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AGNOSTICISM 



Edgar Fawcett's Writings. 



iFiction. 

Rutherford. 

A Gentleman of Leisure. 

A Hopeless Case. 

An Ambitious Woman. 

Social Silhouettes. 

Tinkling Cymbals. 

The Adventures of a Widow. 

The Confessions of Claud, 

The House at High Bridge. 

Olivia Delaplaine. 

A Man's Will. 

Douglas Duane. 

Divided Lives. 

Miriam Balestier. 

A Demoralizing Marriage. 

$5oetrn. 

Fantasy and Passion. 
Song and Story. 
Romance and R every. 

?]^umorous Ucrst* 

The Buntling Ball. 
The New King Arthur. 



AGNOSTICISM 



AND 



OTHER ESSAYS 



/ 

EDGAR FAWCETT 



WITH A PROLOGUE BY 
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 




New York, Chicago, and San Francisco 
BELFORD, CLARKE AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 

LONLION : H. J. DkAKK, LoVELl's COUKI, PATERNObTEK Kl".V 



Copyright, i88g, 

BY 

Belford, Clarke & Co. 



/<-32/^/ 



>. 



CONTENTS 



PAGS 

Robert G. Ingersoll's Prologue, ... 7 

I. Edgar Fawcett, 7 

II. Science, ....... 9 

III. Morality 14 

IV. Spirituality, 18 

V. Reverence, ...... 20 

VI. Existence of God, 21 

Agnosticism, ... .... 25 

The Arrogance of Optimism, . . . .65 

The Browning Craze 106 

The Truth about Ouida, . . . .148 

Should Critics be Gentlemen ? , . . 194 



" ^Heaven help Jis!^ said the old religion ; the nero 
one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach 74s all 
the more to help one another." 

—George Eliot's Letters. 



ROBERT G. INGERSOLL'S PRO» 
LOGUE. 



EDGAR FAWCETT. 

-Edgar Fawcett — a great poet, a meta- 
physician and logician — has been far years 
engaged in exploriiig that strange world 
wherein are supposed to be the springs of 
human action. He has sought for some- 
thing back of motives, reasons, fancies, pas- 
sions, prejudices, and the countless tides 
and tendencies that constitute the life of 
man. 

He has found some ®f the limitations of 
mind, and knows that beginning at that 
luminous centre called consciousness, a few 
short steps bring us to the prison wall 
where vision fails and all light dies. Be- 
yond this wall the eternal darkness broods. 
This gloom is '*the other world" of the 

7 



8 Agnosticism. 

supernaturalist. With him, real vision be- 
gins where the sight fails. He reverses 
the order of nature. Facts become illu- 
sions, and illusions the only realities. He 
believes that the cause of the image, the 
reality, is behind the mirror. 

A few centuries ago the priests said to 
their followers : The other world is above 
you ; it is just beyond where you see. Af- 
terwards the astronomer with his telescope 
looked, and asked the priests : Where is 
the world of which you speak ? And the 
priests replied : It has receded — it is just 
beyond where you see. 

As long as there is "a beyond" there is 
room for the priests' world. Theology is 
the geography of this beyond. 

Between the Christian and the Agnostic 
there is the difference of assertion and 
question — between ** There is a God " and 
"Is there a God ?" The Agnostic has the 
arrogance to admit his ignorance, while 
the Christian from the depths of humility 
impudently insists that he knows. 

Mr. Fawcett has shown that at the root 
of religion lies the coiled serpent of fear, 
and that ceremony, prayer, and worship 
are ways and means to gain the assistance 
or soften the heart of a supposed deity. 



Robert G. Ingcrsoirs Prologue. 9 

He also shows that as man advances in 
knowledge he loses confidence in the 
watchfulness of Providence and in the effi- 
cacy of prayer. 

II. 

SCIENCE. 

The savage is certain of those things 
that cannot be known. He is acquainted 
with origin and destiny, and knows every- 
thing except that which is useful. The 
civilized man, having outgrown the igno- 
rance, the arrogance, and the provincialism 
of savagery, abandons the vain search for 
final causes, for the nature and origin of 
things. 

In nearly every department of science 
man is allowed to investigate, and the dis- 
covery of a new fact is welcomed, unless it 
threatens some creed. 

Of course there can be no advance in 
a religion established by infinite wisdom. 
The only progress possible is in the com- 
prehension of this religion. 

For many generations what is known 
under a vast number of disguises and be- 
hind many masks as the Christian relig- 
ion has been propagated and preserved by 



lO Agnosticism. 



<b 



the sword and bayonet — that is to say, by 
force. The credulity of man has been 
bribed and his reason punished. Those 
who believed without the slightest ques- 
tion, and whose faith held evidence in 
contempt, were saints ; those who inves- 
tigated were dangerous, and those who 
denied were destroyed. 

Every attack upon this religion has been 
made in the shadow of human and divine 
hatred — in defiance of earth and heaven. 
At one time Christendom was beneath the 
ignorant feet of one man, and those who 
denied his infallibility were heretics and 
atheists. At last a protest was uttered. 
The right of conscience was proclaimed, to 
the extent of making a choice between the 
infallible man and the infallible book. 
Those who rejected the man and accepted 
the book became in their turn as merci- 
less, as tyrannical and heartless, as the fol- 
lov^rers of the infallible man. The Protes- 
tants insisted that an infinitely v/ise and 
good God would not allow criminals and 
wretches to act as his infallible agents. 

Afterwards a few protested against the 
infallibility of the book, using the same 
arguments against the book that had for- 
merly been used against the pope. They 



Robert G. In^ersoWs Prologue. 1 1 



•^ 



said that an infinitely wise and good God 
could not be the author of a cruel and 
ignorant book. But those who protested 
against the book fell into substantially the 
same error that had been fallen into by 
those who had protested against the man. 
While they denounced the book, and in- 
sisted that an infinitely wise and good being 
could not have been its author, they took 
the ground that an infinitely wise and 
good being was the creator and governor 
of the world. 

Then was used against them the same 
argument that had been used by the Prot- 
estants against the pope and by the Deists 
against the Protestants. Attention was 
called to the fact that Nature is as cruel 
as any pope or any book — that it is just as 
easy to account for the destruction of the 
Canaanites consistently with the goodness 
of Jehovah as to account for pestilence, 
earthquake, and flood consistently with the 
goodness of the God of Nature. 

The Protestant and Deist both used ar- 
guments against the Catholic that could in 
turn be used Vv^ith equal force against them- 
selves. So that there is no question among 
intelligent people as to the infallibility of 
the pope, as to the inspiration of the 



12 Agnosticism. 

book, or as to the existence of the Chris- 
tian's God — for the conclusion has been 
reached that the human mind is incapable 
of deciding as to the origin and destiny 
of the universe. 

For many generations the mind of man 
has been travelling in a circle. It accepted 
without question the dogma of a First 
Cause — of the existence of a Creator — of 
an Infinite Mind back of matter, and sought 
in many ways to define its ignorance in this 
behalf. The most sincere worshippers have 
declared that this Being is incomprehen- 
sible, — that he is '' without body, parts, or 
passions" — that he is infinitely beyond 
their grasp, — and at the same time have 
insisted that i t was necessary for man not 
only to believe in the existence of this 
Being, but to love him with all his heart. 

Christianity having always been in part- 
nership with the State, — having controlled 
kings and nobles, judges and legislators — • 
having been in partnership with armies 
and with every form of organized de- 
struction, — it was dangerous to discuss the 
foundation of its authority. To speak 
lightly of any dogma was a crime punish- 
able by death. Every absurdity has been 
bastioned and barricaded by the power of 



Robert G. Ingersoirs Prologue. 13 

the State. It has been protected by fist, 
by club, by sword and cannon. 

For many years Christianity succeeded 
in substantially closing the mouihs of its 
enemies, and lived and flourished only 
where investigation and discussion were 
prevented by hypocrisy and bigotry. The 
Church still talks about *' evidence," about 
''reason," about "freedom of conscience" 
and the ''liberty of speech," and yet 
denounces those who ask for evidence, who 
appeal to reason, and who honestly express 
their thoughts. 

To-day we know that the miracles of 
Christianity areas puerile and false as those 
ascribed to the medicine-men of Central 
Africa or the Fiji Islanders, and that the 
" sacred scriptures " have the same claim 
to inspiration that the Koran has or the 
Book of Mormon — no less, no more. These 
questions have been settled and laid aside 
by free and intelligent people. They have 
ceased to excite interest; and the man who 
now really believes in the truth of the Old 
Testament is regarded with a smile — looked 
upon as an aged child — still satisfied with 
the luUabys and toys of the cradle. 



14 Agnosticism. 

III. 

MORALITY. 

It is contended that without religion — 
that is to say, without Christianity — all 
ideas of morality must of necessity perish, 
and that spirituality and reverence will be 
lost. 

What is morality ? 

Is it to obey without question, or is it to 
act in accordance with perceived obliga- 
tion ? Is it something witli which intel- 
ligence has nothing to do? Must the 
ignorant child carry out the command of 
the wise father — the rude peasant rush to 
death at the request of the prince? 

Is it impossible for morality to exist where 
the brain and heart are in partnership? 
Is there no foundation for morality ex- 
cept punishment threatened or reward 
promised by a superior to an inferior ? If 
this be true, how can the superior be 
virtuous ? Cannot the reward and tlie 
threat be in the nature of things ? Can 
they not rest in consequences perceived by 
the intellect? How can the existence or 
non-existence of a deity change my obli- 
gation to keep my hands out of the fire ? 



Robert G. Inge r so II s Prologue. i 5 

The results of all actions are equally cer- 
tain, but not equally known, not equally 
perceived. If all men knew with perfect cer- 
tainty that to steal from another was to rob 
themselves, larceny would cease. It can- 
not be said too often that actions are good 
or bad in the light of consequences, and 
that a clear perception of consequences 
would control actions. That which in- 
creases the sum of human happiness is 
moral ; that which diminishes the sum 
of human happiness is immoral. Blind, 
unreasoning obedience is the enemy of 
morality. Slavery is not the friend of 
virtue. Actions are neither right nor 
wrong by virtue of what men or gods can 
say ; the right or wrong lives in results — 
in the nature of things, growing out of 
relations violated or caused. 

Accountability lives in the nature of con- 
sequences — in their absolute certainty — in 
the fact that they cannot be placated, avoid- 
ed, or bribed. 

The relations of human life are too 
complicated to be accurately and clearly 
understood, and, as a consequence, rules 
of action vary from age to age. The ideas / 
of right and wrong change with the ex 
perience of the race, and this change i: 



1 6 Agnosticism. 

wrought by the gradual ascertaining of 
consequences — of results. For this reason 
the religion of one age fails to meet the 
standard of another, precisely as the laws 
that satisfied our ancestors are repealed by 
us ; so that, in spite of all efforts, religion 
itself is subject to gradual and perpetual 
change. 

The miraculous is no longer the basis of 
morals. Man is a sentient being — he suf- 
fers and enjoys. In order to be happy he 
must preserve the conditions of well-being 
— must live in accordance with certain 
facts by which he is surrounded. If he 
violates these conditions the result is un- 
happiness, failure, disease, misery. 

Man must have food, roof, raiment, fire- 
side, friends — that is to say, prosperity; and 
this he must earn — this he must deserve. 
He is no longer satisfied with being a 
slave, even of the Infinite. He wishes to 
perceive for himself, to understand, to in- 
vestigate, to experiment ; and he has at 
last the courage to bear the consequences 
that he brings upon himself. He has also 
found that those who are the most religious 
are not always the kindest, and that those 
who have been and are the worshippers 
of God enslave their fellow-men. He has 



Robert G. Inger soil's Prologue. 1 7 

found that there is no necessary connection 
between religion and morality. 

Morality needs no supernatural assistance 
— needs neither miracle nor pretence. It! 
has nothing to do with awe, reverence, 
credulity, or blind, unreasoning faith. 
Morality is the highway perceived by the 
soul, the direct road, leading to success, 
honor, and happiness. 

The best thing to do under the circum- 
stances is moral. 

The highest possible standard is human. 
We put ourselves in the places of others. 
We are made happy by the kindness of 
others, and we feel that a fair exchange of 
good actions is the wisest and best com- 
merce. We know that others can make us 
miserable by acts of hatred and injustice, 
and we shrink from inflicting the pain upon 
others that we have felt ourselves : this is 
the foundation of conscience. 

If man could not suffer, the words right 
and wrong could never have been spoken. 

The agnostic, the infidel, clearly per- 
ceives the true basis of morals, and, so 
perceiving, he knows that the religious 
man, the superstitious man, caring more 
for God than for his fellows, will sacrifice his 
fellows, either at the supposed command of 



1 8 A;rnosticisui. 



<b 



his God, or to win his approbation. He 
also knows that the religionist has no basis 
for morals except these supposed com- 
mands. The basis of morality with him 
lies not in the nature of things, but in the 
caprice of some deity. He seems to think 
that, had it not been for the Ten Command- 
ments, larceny and murder might have 
been virtues. 

IV. 

SPIRITUALITY. 

What is it to be spiritual ? 

Is this fine quality of the mind destroyed 
by the development of the brain ? As the 
domain v/rested by science from ignorance 
increases — as island after island and con- 
tinent after continent are discovered — as 
star after star and constellation after con- 
stellation in the intellectual world burst 
upon tlie midnight of ignorance, does the 
spirituality of the mind grow less and 
less ? Like morality, is it only found in the 
company of ignorance and superstition ? Is 
the spiritual man honest, kind, candid ? — or 
dishonest, cruel, and hypocritical ? Does 
he say what he thinks ? Is he guided by 
reason ? Is he the friend of the right ? — 



% 



Robert G. Inge r soil's Prologue, 19 

the champion of the truth ? Must this 
splendid quality called spirituality be re- 
tained through the loss of candor ? Can 
we not truthfully say that absolute candor 
is the beginning of wisdom ? 

To recognize the finer harmonies of con- 
duct — to live to the ideal — to separate the 
incidental, the evanescent, from the per- 
petual — to be enchanted with the perfect 
melody of truth — open to the influences of 
the artistic, the beautiful, the heroic — to 
shed kindness as the sun sheds light — to 
recognize the good in others, and to include 
the world in the idea of self — this is to be 
spiritual. 

There is nothing spiritual in the worship 
of the unknown and unknowable, in the 
self-denial of a slave at the command of a 
master whom he fears. Fastings, prayings, 
mutilations, kneelings, and mortifications 
are either the results of, or result in, in- 
sanity. This is the spirituality of Bedlam, 
and is of no kindred with the soul that 
finds its greatest joy in the discharge of 
obligation perceived. 



20 Agnosticism. 



REVERENCE. 

What is reverence ? 

It is the feeling produced when we stand 
in the presence of our ideal, or of that 
which most nearly approaches it — that 
which is produced by what we consider the 
highest degree of excellence. 

The highest is reverenced, praised, and 
admired without quaiiiication. Each man 
reverences according to his nature, his ex- 
perience, his intellectual development. He 
may reverence Nero or Marcus Aurelius, 
Jehovah or Buddha, the author of Leviti- 
cus or Shakespeare. Thousands of men 
reverence John Calvin, Torquemada, and 
the Puritan fathers ; and some have greater 
respect for Jonathan Edwards than for 
Captain Kidd. 

A vast number of people have great 
reverence for anything that is covered by 
mould, or moss, or mildew. They bow low 
before rot and rust, and adore the worth- 
less things that have been saved by the 
negligence of oblivion. They are enchanted 
w^ith the dull and fading daubs of the old 
masters, and hold in contempt those mir- 



Robert G. Inger soil's Prologue » 2i 

acles of art, the paintings of to-day. They 
worship the ancient, the shadowy, the 
mysterious, the wonderful. They doubt 
the value of anything that they understand. 

The creed of Christendom is the enemy 
of morality. It teaches that the innocent 
can justly suffer for the guilty, that conse- 
quences can be avoided by repentance, and 
that in the world of mind the great fact 
known as cause and effect does not apply. 

It is the enemy of spirituality, because it 
teaches that credulity is of more value 
than conduct, and because it pours con- 
tempt upon human love by raising far 
above it the adoration of a phantom. 

It is the enemy of reverence. It makes 
ignorance the foundation of virtue. It be- 
littles the useful, and cheapens the noblest 
of the virtues. It teaches man to live on 
mental alms, and glorifies the intellectual 
pauper. It holds candor in contempt, and 
is the malignant foe of mental manhood. 

VI. 

EXISTENCE OF GOD. 

Mr. Fawcett has shown conclusively 
that it is no easier to establish the existence 
of an infinitely wise and good being by the 



22 Agnosticism. 

existence of what we call "good" than to 
establish the existence of an infinitely bad 
being by what we call " bad." 

Nothing can be surer than that the his- 
tory of this world furnishes no foundation 
on which to base an inference that it has 
been governed by infinite wisdom and 
goodness. So terrible has been the condi- 
tion of man that religionists in all ages have 
endeavored to excuse God by accounting 
for the evils of the world by the wickedness 
of men. And the Fathers of the Christian 
Church were forced to take the ground 
that this world had been filled with briers 
and thorns, with deadly serpents and with 
poisonous weeds, with disease and crime 
and earthquake and pestilence and storm, 
by the curse of God. 

The probability is that no God has 
\J cursed, and that no God will bless, this 
earth. Man suffers and enjoys according 
to conditions. The sunshines without love, 
and the lightning blasts without hate. 
Man is the Providence of man. 

Nature gives to our eyes all they can see, 
to our ears all they can hear, and to the 
mind what it can comprehend. The human 
race reaps the fruit of every victory won on 
the fields of intellectual or physical conflict. 



Rohcrt G. Ingcrsoir s Prologue. 23 

We have no right to expect something for 
nothing. Man will reap no harvest the 
seeds of which he has not sown. 

The race must be guided by intelligence, 
must be free to investigate, and must have 
the courage and the candor not only to 
state what is known, but to cheerfully ad- 
mit the limitations of the mind. 

No intelligent, honest man can read what 
Mr. Fawcett has written and then say that 
he knows the origin and destiny of things — 
that he knows whether an Infinite Being 
exists or not, that he knows whether the soul 
of man is or is not immortal. 

In the land of , the geography of 

which is not certainly known, there was for 
many years a great dispute among the in- 
habitants as to which road led to the City 
of Miragia, the capital of their country, and 
known to be the most delightful city on the 
earth. For fifty generations the discussion 
as to which road led to the city had been 
carried on with the greatest bitterness, un- 
til finally the people were divided into a 
great number of parties, each party claim- 
ing that the road leading to the city had 
been miraculously made known to the 
founder of that particular sect. The various 
parties spent most of their time putting up 



24 Agnosticis7n. 

guide-boards on these roads and tearing 
down the guide-boards of others. Hun- 
dreds of thousands had been killed, prisons 
were filled, and the fields had been ravaged 
by the hosts of war. 

One day, a wise man, a patriot, wishing 
to bring peace to his country, met the 
leaders of the various sects and asked them 
whether it was absolutely certain that the 
City of Miragia existed. He called their 
attention to the facts that no resident of 
that city had ever visited them and that 
none of their fellow-men who had started 
for the capital had ever returned, and 
modestly asked whether it would not be 
better to satisfy themselves beyond a doubt 
that there was such a city, adding that 
the location of the city would determine 
which of all the roads was the right one. 

The leaders heard these words with 
amazement. They denounced the speaker 
as a wretch without morality, spirituality, 
or reverence, and thereupon he was torn in 
pieces. 

Robert G. Ingersoll. 



"^^C-.-^-'^—t^ 




^^ 



PART II. 
z==. AGNOSTICISM. 



Rationalism owes a debt of gratitude to 
him who coined the word "agnostic." 
Previously there had been only " infidel " 
and " atheist," and one or two other similar 
terms, all irate bayonets pointed at the 
very teeth of orthodoxy. They were words, 
too, that had attained a kind of rowdy, 
buccaneering prominence ; they appeared 
to prowl, like verbal guerillas, upon the 
outskirts of accepted vocabularies. Be- 
sides, they failed clearly to express, in 
many cases, the mental attitudes of those 
to whom they were applied. A good many 
sensible and moral people abode in the 
world who felt as averse to denying the ex- 
istence of a deity as they did to affirming 
it. They resembled, to a certain degree, 
the chancellor in Tennyson's " Sleeping 
Beauty," who diplomatically 

*"' Dallied with his golden chain and smiling put the 
question by." 

25 



26 As^nosticism. 



Still, about the real agnostic spirit there is 
much more sincerity than diplomacy. It 
means, in its finest sense, a courageous en- 
visaging of the awful problems of life and 
death, and an admission of their total in- 
solubility. It might almost, in particular 
temperaments and personalities, be said to 
have become a sort of new religion by it- 
self, simpler than that of Comte, with his 
complex and deliberated apings of Christian 
forms, and yet capable in some respects of 
being classed with Positivism. At the 
same time, a very large majority of agnos- 
tics are quite without the reverential sense. 
" I do not know " precludes in them all 
tendency to "divine" or to ''feel." Nor 
should they be blamed for this indifference, 
reluctance, or whatever it may be called. 
Emotion and reason have an arctic and ant- 
arctic divergence. 

The average type of agnostic has reached 
his present position through the help of 
reason, and therefore he cannot be expected 
to abandon the power which has made him 
what he is. That power would not desert 
him, indeed, even if he should try to ex- 
orcise it. He recognizes this truth and so 
patiently accepts the ally with which 
destiny has provided him. If he leans 



Agnosticism. 27 

toward absolute atheism — toward a denial 
of any conscious and intelligent ruler 
of the universe — he does so because vast 
weight of evidence impels him in that 
direction, while a comparatively small in- 
fluence lures him in another. Not long ago 
an eminent thinker said to me, in a moment 
of colloquial confidence : "Truly, the most 
extraordinary idea which ever entered the 
brain of man is that of a personal, over- 
watching deity." Most modern agnostics 
may be said to hold precisely this amazed 
view of the case. And yet they wull not 
deny the deity either of ecclesiastic faith or 
of operative imagination. No one has ever 
seen the other side of the moon, and if you 
were to tell an agnostic that you felt sure 
this concealed lunar hemisphere was blazing 
with active volcanoes he would not consider 
himself authorized to deny your statement. 
He might seriously doubt it, but he would 
not deny it. His quarrel with the atheist 
is not bitter, but it is appreciable. The 
latter declares "There is no god," but the 
former, firmly as he may believe so, scorns 
assertion based upon partial proof. "Until 
I have solved the secret of the universe," 
says the agnostic, " I shall forbear from 
stating how, why or by whom it was 



28 Agnosticism. 

created." He realizes just how potent an 
CEdipus is requisite to make the Sphinx 
cast herself into the sea. 

What, may be asked, are the causes which 
lead agnosticism to doubt that an almighty, 
I tutelary and merciful power dwells behind 
.the manifestations of nature ? In the first 
place one might almost affirm that the good 
and evil which we see around us make any 
^ >>kind of conscious beneficent power beyond 

them a self-contradiction if not a nullity. 
For it is hard to conceive of a virtuous 
and omnipotent god permitting misery 
jSuch as that with which our planet teems, 
/and it is equally hard to conceive of a 
diabolic and omnipotent god not stamp- 
ing out the happiness which also cer- 
tainly abounds upon earth. John Stuart 
Mill has suggested the possibility of there 
being two gods forever at war with one 
another, from whose perpetual contest all 
admirable and deplorable things result ; 
but this acute English thinker has touched 
upon the idea of such a celestial antago- 
nism with a delicacy that might be defined 
as the irony of metaphysics, and no one 
more clearly apprehended than did he the 
complete idleness of mere «/r/^;7 specula- 
tion. /Again, agnosticism has to-day con- 



d 



Agnosticism. 29 

vinced itself that all religions bear the sure 
evidence of having originated solely in 
man's intercourse with his fellow-men. At 
the root of all worship lies one element — 
that of fear, and the fear-begotten desire 
to propitiate some hostile though viewless 
agency. Christianity, and other creeds de- 
pendent upon a so-called '' revelation," have 
never produced a single auihentic proof of 
their validity./ Waiving members of the 
Brahmin, the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, 
the Parsee, and of other noteworthy faiths, 
no Christian would at the present time ac- 
cept for an instant as credible any fact so 
faintly supported by historic data as that 
of the alleged miraculous birth of Christ, 
not to mention his having turned water 
into wine, his having caused a dead man 
. to live again, or his having defied the laws 
of gravitation by floating up into the sky 
and so disappearing before the gaze of a 
multitude. But the Christian insists upon 
accepting as facts these follies redolent of 
the grossest ignorance and superstition. 
The Christian unhesitatingly asserts, too, 
that morality is a product of direct revela- 
tion from some sort of anthropomorphic^ 
spirit to mankind, instead of having been 
gradually evolved through slow stages of 



30 Agnosticism. 

civilization, which began at a condition 
lower than barbarism or cannibalism. The 
Christian clings to this astonishing tenet 
in the face of all that science has so ably 
and amply taught him to the contrary. 
And yet he by no means rejects the copious 
and precious teachings of science. He re- 
spects them, indeed, with all the practical 
ardor of an agnostic. If the wind blows 
harsh from the east he does not content 
himself with praying to his god that it 
may fail to inflict pneumonia upon his fa- 
vorite child. He bids that child button 
stout wraps about the person and avoid 
breathing too deeply the icy air. No 
amount of trust in '' providence " would 
induce him to let a bushel of rotting vege- 
tables pollute his cellar for a single day. 
When he or any one dear to him is ill^ he 
seeks physician and not parson. Even if 
NT he be a Roman Catholic, he gives the calo- 
mel or the quinine, the nux vomica or the 
bismuth, full curative scope, before he wel- 
comes the hollow mummery of extreme unc- 
tion. In all his goings and comings, among 
all the details of his daily routine, the 
Christian is quite as much a servant and 
f^ devotee of scientific discovery and testi- 
mony as the most pronounced agnostic 



Agnosticism. 31 

who ever smiled at the absurdities of an 
Adam, an Eve and an Edet^j He will tell 
youone minute thata benign tenderness and \ ClD 
compassion are forever invisibly befriending 
him, and he will refer, the next, to having 
taken passage for Europe on a particular 
line of steamers because that is notorious- 
ly the safest. If his house be insufficiently 
guarded against lightning and yet be 
struck some day without injury resulting 
to any of its occupants, he will fall on his 
knees, most probably, in heartfelt thanks- 
giving to a kindly and protective person- 
ality whose august will forges the thunder- 
bolt and determines its flight. But on the 
following day he will be sure, if he can af- 
ford it, to have the whole house well- 
equipped with lightning-rods. 

From proofs like these the agnostic finds ' 
himself arguing that the Christian does not 
believe half so implicitly as he is under the I 
impression that he believes. For, if his be- ^ 
lief were absolute, he would ignore his nat- ' [^ 
ural environment a great deal more than he 
already does, in a fixed certainty that what ; 
was to be would be, and that from first to ' 
last his mortal career was under a clement 
and sympathizing guardianship. Or, if it 
were really credited by the Christian that 



<} 



32 Aguosticism, 

human ills befall the faithful as blessings 
in disguise, then he would nerve himself to 
receive such apparent disasters with ten 
times that stoicism which we now see him; 
exhibit. 

'^ That any other than a god of exquisite 
"cruelty should inflict these disasters upon 
mankind while the centuries continue to 
roll along, puzzles the agnostic in marked 
degree. Nothing is more common than to 
hear, from enthusiastic Christians, words 
that express passionate encomium of the 
grandeur and splendor of creation. " How 
could all this beauty and magnificence ex- 
ist," they cry, " unless a god of surpassing 
worth and wisdom produced them ?" But 
they forget that for every agreeable or al- 
luring feature there is one correspondingly 
odious and repellent. If the rose blooms, 
the poisonous plant thrives as well. If the 
sky bends blue and lucid above us, the 
tempest, with shafts of death and hurri- 
canes of ruin, also has its reign there. If 
health glows in certain faces, disease rav- 
ages others. If sanity is the blessed en- 
dowment of many minds, madness is to 
many a curse and bane. If sexual love 
finds often its rightful and genial gratifica- 
tion, often it finds a terrible discontent, an 



Ag no si ids m. 53 

agonizing repulse. If there are the buoy- 
ancy and gladness of youth, so are there 
the decrepitude and pathos of old age. If 
there is the joy of perfect marriage, so is 
there the sorrow of the widower and the 
widow — or, perhaps even worse, the troub- 
lous disunion of ill-mated pairs. And thus 
the chain of contrast might be extended, 
until we have seen that, link by link, it all 
means just so much happiness for just so 
much distress, just so much light for just 
so' much darkness. 

Now, if an affectionate god is the author 
of all that we term good, \ve cannot deny 
h is ^acc ou n tabillty fo-r all that we term evil. 
If he made the lily, in its chaste and odor- 
ous loveliness, he made the cancer, a flower 
of hideous petal and mephitic exhalation/ 
Nor will it serve us to affirm that all bale- 
ful things in life are the offspring of a hid- 
den, inscrutable charity toward the race. 
It is within the limit of every mian's imag- 
ination to picture himself as realizing, in 
some post-mortem state, that all afflictions 
poured upon humanity have indeed been 
"for the best." But even if he were then 
to concede that this had been wholly true, 
he could never fairly avoid the declaration 
that anguish and calamity are, here and 



34 Agnosticisui. 

now, persecutions and martyrdoms ruth- 
lessly wreaked upon his living earthly kin- 
dred. He must always have that quarrel 
with any god he might meet outside of the 
flesh from which he has escaped. To le 
grand petit ctre he must always be ready to 
present le grand pourquoi. At least, he 
must do so if we can speak of a disembod- 
ied soul as an entity to be dealt with by 
laws of human consciousness. And how 
else can we possibly deal with such an 
entity? 

But, on the other hand, can we deal with 
it at all ? Do we know, even in the vaguest 
way, what the words * a disembodied soul ' 
mean? They, and the melodious polysyl- 
lable, * immortality,* pass glibly enough 
from the lips. A great many estimable 
people are quite sure that they know pre- 
cisely what is meant in the utterance of 
them. But in reality these expressions are 
quite w^ild and void. It will not do to say 
that the Bible has told us what they mean, 
for even admitting that the Bible be not a 
book wrought by excessively ignorant and 
superstitious men from material in part if 
not v/holly fabulous, the information which 
it conveys on subjects of a supernatural 
import is of no more real value than a tale 



Agnosiicisiii. 35 

like that of Leda and the Swan or any of 
the thousand myths embedded amid other 
creeds. There is not the slightest reason 
why we should look upon the chronicle of 
either Jeremiah or St. Matthew, of either 
Samuel or St. Mark, as veracious. No his- 
torian of the least real repute would, at the 
present day, affirm them to be so. The 
very existence of that particular Christ 
whose life and death are recorded in the 
New Testament is by no means a proven 
fact. The ridiculous story that he was 
born of a virgin is scarcely less to be re» 
spected by unbiassed judges than the story 
that he was ever born at all. He is a fig- 
ure not a whit more actual than Helen of 
Sparta, Achilles or Hector, and the entire 
legend of his crucifixion has no more his- 
toric weight than that of the siege of Troy. 
But there probably was an Achilles, a 
siege of Troy, and there probably was a 
Christ, a crucifixion. No proof that his 
Messiah was divine seems to the Christian 
a stronger one than such reported words 
and deeds as those of the four gospels. 
Yet here are both words and deeds which 
often partake rather of the anchorite's aus- 
tere self-mortification and asceticism than 
of the liberal and virile philanthropist's 



36 Agiwsticisui. 

doctrines and axioms. The character of 
Christ, as his apostles depict it, is that of a 
sweet-souled, pure-minded communist, yet 
it is also an individuality filled with im- 
practicable meekness and a tendency to- 
ward beautiful yet dangerous kindliness in 
its dealings with the frailties, crimes and 
sins of society. The best and purest of 
modern Christians could not conscien- 
tiously endorse the pardoning posture 
shown by this Christ whom he so adores. 
It is one thing to worship such an un- 
flawed spirit as an ideal of mildness and 
compassion ; it is another to approve meas- 
ures of lowlihead and amiability which, if 
carried out in the government of multi- 
tudes by an executive, would entail an- 
archy of the worst license. We cannot tell 
hardened culprits to go and sin no more ; 
tJiey are always glad enough to "go," but 
their wrongdoing is not half so easy of 
dismissal. To be roughly assaulted by 
some m^iscreant and to bid him assault 
us again — to turn the other cheek toward 
him after he has smitten us upon, one — is 
a personal revelation of self-control com- 
mendable only within the limits of Christ's 
especial disposition: — that of altruistic 
goodfellowship, equally wide and indulgent 



Agjiosticism. 37 

But if we overlook the question of slighted 
self-respect, how can we approve, in this 
connection, a course so fatally destructive 
to ail true social order as that of forgive- 
ness for wrong and outrage unaccompanied 
by the least thought of corrective discipline 
and punishment? j Christ, during the brief 
period that he is said to have appeared be- 
fore men, preached a theory w^hich would 
have flung open the doors of prisons and 
set loose upon cities and communities the 
most depraved desperadoes whom iron 
caofes ever souo^ht to detain. And this 
form of counsel in him his worshippers 
have admired as a piece of poetic abstrac- 
tion alone. They have no more made it 
the actual rule of their lives than they 
have thus made the socialistic " leave all 
and follow^ me " of his other celebrated 
sayings. / 

But v/hile agnosticism of to-day recoils 
from much that Christ has been accredited 
with stating and desiring as devoid of due 
dignity for the individual and without 
proper adhesive effect upon society at large, 
it still fails to see in surrounding nature 
even a vague confirmation of the promise 
which this lovely and smooth-voiced 
prophet so perpetually gives us of a life 



Qs 



38 Aguosficisni. 

after death. That wittiest and occasion- 
ally saddest of writers, Dumas the younger, 
is said to have inscribed these w^ords in the 
album of a friend who solicited some sen- 
timent over his autograph : "'' L'espoir qua 
rhotnme de la vie immortelle lui vient de son 
di'sespoir de se tr Oliver mortel dans celui-ci." 
Here, one might say, lies the whole pith 
and marrow of modern if not ancient re- 
ligion. Our despair of being mortal in 
this world prompts us to fabricate for our- 
selves an eternal duration in some other ! 
And yet the epigram of Dumas has not 
touched the entire truth. Epigrams rarely 
do that ; they are fire-flies glittering in dark 
places but not illuminating them, and they 
show us little except their own transitory 
brightness. He neglects that impulse of 
hope in every healthful human breast — 
that " will to live," which is the one solid 
grain of truth in Schopenhauer's and Von 
Hartmann's brilliant though faulty philoso- 
phies. The vast majority of mankind can- 
not help believing in a future existence, 
because for men not to have hope is either 
to be the victim of distemper or else to 
verge upon death itself. Forms of insanity 
called melancholia and suicidal mania show 
a complete collapse of this energy ; the 



AgnosticisDi. 39 

skilled physician knows well these symp- 
toms in his demented patient, unless it may 
be that their sudden manifestation defeats 
his most wary vigilance. Yet agnosticism, 
which insists upon regarding facts and re- 
jecting such fanciful ghosts of them as 
strut in their borrowed robes, has clearly 
taught itself that our hopes of immortality 
bear an exact analogous relation to our 
yearnings and desires in all affairs of a 
more restricted yet equally pungent kind. 
Supposing that w^e are in a state of ordi- 
nary health, we wake at a certain hour of 
the morning after a fairly restful sleep. 
Our pulse is firm; our liver acts ; the ma- 
chinery of vitality does not falter. Imme- 
diately, as soon as we are w^ell awake, we 
begin plans for the da}^, w^e bethink our- 
selves of engagements made on the day 
previous, we wush to enter upon one more 
diurnal routine of employment, duty and 
diversion. 1 Agnostics or Christians, we 
have this same quiet, automatic longing.. 
And yet the extreme futility of all human 
endeavor, the evanescence of all we pur- 
pose and perform, may be and often is 
inexorably clear to the agnostic, while he 
himself would nevertheless be the first to 
admit that a strenuous force which he can- 



40 Agnosticism. 

not explain forever lifts and buoys him. 
But with the ill or ailing man how differ- 
ent it is ! A pessimist might maintain that 
the jaundiced eyes of such a man often 
behold us as the masque of shadows we 
really are. To his despondent brain life 
will sometimes appear as arid and weari- 
some as a burnt prairie under a sky of 
slate. The concept of an immortality for 
the human soul will seem to him like some 
remote conjecture born of a fanatic's 
revery. 

And such it really deserves to be called. 
The agnostic, though he may hope to win 
it or though he may prefer the nepenthean 
boon of complete annihilation, sees that, 
for all he can possibly learn to the contrary, 
it shines the ignis fatuus which must per- 
petually evade philosophic grasp. With 
wings wrought from rainbows, and eyes 
from stars, it is but the intangible child of 
story, song and dream. Like the kXCOl fioi 
of Homeric text, reference to it constantly 
recurs on page after page of the immense 
book of life. The tale of no nation could 
be adequately told without it, and when- 
ever fancy has conspired with faith to 
achieve the most madcap results of illusion, 
we are confronted by its Elysiums, Valhal- 



Agtwsticisni. 41 

las and Nirwanas. But the agnostic well 
understands that the species of theological 
ecstasy which has always surrounded it 
conduces ill toward a proper logical sur- 
vey. '' Refrain," says Herbert Spencer, in 
his great ' Psychology,' " from rendering 
your terms into ideas, and you may reach 
any conclusion whatever. ' The whole is 
equal to its part ' is a proposition that may 
be quite comfortably entertained, so long 
as neither wholes nor parts are imagined." 
It will probably be many centuries before 
mankind at length abandons all belief in 
immortality. Resembling not a few sim- 
ilar delusions, it possesses undeniable 
charm^ and has that sort of beauty which 
the astute Mr. Lecky tells us that religious 
ideas, like a dying sun, expend their last 
rays in creating. 

Agnosticism finds little rebuff nowadays 
for its lack of conventional belief. The 
pulpiteers make " infidelity " their texts, 
it is true, but it takes a very ardent church- 
goer, among really intelligent classes of 
church-goers, not to compare the keen, lim- 
pid reasoning of our modern scientific 
writers with the mystic, turgid, involved 
utterances of the Bible greatly to the lat- 
ter's disadvantage. There is more moral 



42 Agnosiicisin. 

profit in half-a-dozen pages of Herbert 
Spencer's "Data of Ethics" or *' Social 
Statics" than in all the statements of Paul, 
vague, problematic, transcendental. And 
yet the accusation of unmoral apathy and 
indifference is often brought against agnos- 
ticism. '' It builds no hospitals," cry its 
foes ; '' it endows no charities ; it is pagan 
in its unconcern for the sufferings of hu- 
manity. It is so occupied in sneering at 
Holy Writ that it forgets the sweet lessons 
of loving-kindness and of devotion to an 
unstained ideal with Vv^hich those deathless 
leaves abound." Now, agnosticism forgets 
nothing of the sort, and is willing to give 
the New Testament credit for every line 
and word of sound ethics contained there, 
just as it is unsparing in its denunciation 
and disgust when asked an opinion of those 
crimes and horrors with which the records 
of the Old Testament teem, and of that 
bloody, vengeful Jehovah who makes up 
for not possessing the sensualism and lust 
of Jupiter by exhibiting ten times more of 
his deliberate cruelty and hatred. Agnos- 
ticism is very far, moreover, from the cal- 
lous indifference with which it is so fre- 
quently charged. If it has not erected 
manv charitable institutions and has headed 



Agnosiicisvi. 43 

few eleemosynary lists, we must remember 
that it has not, like Christianity, almost 
two thousand years behind it. There have 
been a great many lukewarm Christians, 
if almsgiving is a test of the finer devoted- 
ness. But already agnosticism has made, 
in this respect, an excellent showing, when 
we consider its youth as a modern move- 
ment — a nineteenth-century wave of ten- 
dency — apart from earlier unorthodox 
growths. Professor Felix Adler has deep- 
ly and valuably interested himself in tene- 
ment-house reform, and many another New 
York citizen (to say nothing of those in 
London) yearly gives large sums to the 
poor, unstimulated by any expectation of 
receiving angelic compound interest here- 
after upon his earthly loan. Indeed, I 
learned, not long ago, that the English 
poet, Mr. William Morris, had expended a 
large fortune in aiding what he believed to 
be the cause of the poor against the rich. Mr. 
Morris's motives may be declared socialis- 
tic rather than simply and humanely gen- 
erous; but they nevertheless afford one 
more instance of a rationalist and free- 
thinker who does not live in selfish disre- 
gard of his fellow-men. In fact this fling 
at agnosticism as being so cold-blooded- 



44 



A ^r/iosticisin. 




ly epicurean resembles the absurd rumors 
which were set afloat after the deaths of 
Voltaire and Thomas Paine. It is prob- 
able that these two famous infidels died 
very much the same as ordinary mortals 
die, though a few random, delirious mur- 
murs may have been readily misinterpreted 
by partisan listeners. Not long ago we 
had occasion to see with what sweet and 
sublime courage a freethinker could 
breathe his last, when Courtlandt Palmer 
summoned wife and children to his bedside 
and addressed them in words full of the 
gentlest and most fearless tranquillity. 
And yet if Palmer's mind had wandered, 
at the last, and some grisly hallucination 
had chanced to usurp it, how probable that 
there would have been somebody — a servant, 
perhaps, or one of the country-folk in that 
quiet Vermont retreat where his death oc- 
curred — who would have asserted mon- 
strous things about his final '" remorseful 
agonies" ! 

As for charitable inclination on the part 
of agnosticism, it is just as certain to aug- 
ment with increasing years as frigid ava- 
rice is certain to develop. There was never 
a more preposterous statement than tKat 
the religion ot Christ brought humanita- 



Agtiosticisui. 45 

fianism into the world. Man's pity for his 
lellow-man existedHa thousand years pre- 
viously in India, where hospitals were 
among the comforts of civilization. Very 
possibly the standard of physical health in 
Greece and Rome was far above ours, and 
hence hospitals were not required in either 
nation. If it were true, as so often has 
been affirmed, that the Romans exposed 
their old people to die on an island in the 
Tiber, then such action (grossly inconsist- 
ent with the splendid morality of the race 
previous to its downfall) must be explained 
as the _deed4ierp€4ra4€4--by^-a— cHqu e ratjie r 
than a class — and a most depraved and 
vagabond one at that. And even in the 
latter case these exposed persons were 
probably slaves. Both Rome and Greece, 
the countries that produced Caesar and 
Themistocles, Cicero and Aristotle, were 
cursed by slavery. So was the United 
States, until a few years ago. Who shall 
presume to say that in this highly Chris- 
tian country cruelties have not taken place 
that might bring envious glitters into the 
eyes of a Caligula ? And if agnosticism had 
been a prevailing characteristic of the 
populace south of Mason and Dixon's line, 
how easy to have held it blamable for the 



46 Agnosticism. 

brutalities of the whipping-post, the drunk- 
en overseer, the hideous auction and the 
pursuant bloodhound ! In the days of 
their real glory Greece and Rome were 
marked by a phenomenal refinement and 
a morale of surpassing integrity. Chris- 
tianity, which may be said to have bathed 
Europe in bloodshed, brought also the im- 
passioned zealot with his dreams of heav- 
enly bliss and the martyr with his unflinch- 
ing gaze at the fagots which were to con- 
sume him. But there are no grander ex- 
amples in mediaeval times of unsvv'erving 
adherence to duty at the price of absolute 
self-sacrifice and self-immolation than those 
given us in ancient times by such men as 
Brutus and Virginius. And if agnosticism 
should wish to point toward a man of un- 
paralleled probity, consistency and bravery 
as its representative, what figure could 
more sufficiently stand for these qualities 
than that intrepid and picturesque one 
of Giordano Bruno ? When we consider 
the superb intellectual heights which were 
attained by Athens, how nonsensical seems 
the claim that Christianity bore civili- 
zation in its wake, or that what we call 
European civilization was anything except 
that evolutional result of cerebral and 



Agnosticism. 47 

climatic conditions indicated so compe- 
tently by Buckle, Draper and writers of 
their forceful calibre ! Full as many sins 
as virtues have been committed in the name 
of the Cross. The Inquisition, the Massacre 
of St. Bartholomew, the slaughter of the 
Albigenses, the appalling persecutions of 
the Jews, all should now belong to the very 
alphabet of juvenile instruction. But alas ! 
it is not every child who is permitted to 
profit by such historic truths in their can- 
did nakedness. Happily, the children of 
agnostics are always allowed this privilege. 
A novel which has for many months 
been occupying the attention of English 
and American readers, presumably has 
won its great vogue from the challenge 
which its charming though not profound 
pages have cast at agnosticism. There 
are few more entertaining stories than 
" Robert Elsmere," and if it were a trifle 
more chiselled in style than it already is, it 
might easily take rank among the master- 
pieces of fiction. This is said, however, 
purely from the literary standpoint ; from 
the standpoint of sincere and valid think- 
ing it is a work narrow with all the pecul- 
iar and ''trimming" narrowness of 'the late 
Matthew Arnold, whose influence has been 



48 Agnosticism. 

diffused through its pages and who easily 
shows himself as the Mentor of its creative 
Telemachus. Robert Elsmere is a noble 
and lovable being, and one plainly meant 
by the author to express liberalism and 
large-mindedness at the very last limit of 
their admissible extension. But Mrs. Ward, 
like her kinsman and posthumous coadju- 
tor, Matthew Arnold, halts at a point plainly 
wathin the bounds of conventional thought. 
Elsmere, though trained as an English 
clerg3'man, gives up his living because a 
belief in the " divinity" of Christ has be- 
come to him a void and sham. But in- 
stead of allowing full play to his rich gifts 
of fellowship and helpfulness without fur- 
ther concern for the ghost-worship from 
which he should now be happily freed, we 
find him building a new faith upon the 
: ruins of the old. Unitarianism has alwa ys 
I been one of the drollest of compromises 
betweeiTChristianity and_agnostjcismy and 
although Elsmere does not attempt to walk 
on this curious bridge that joins two such 
widely different banks, he nevertheless 
clearly avoids that boldness and justice of 
mental demeanor which might have been 
expected from a man of both his native and 
cultivated equipments. Mr. Huxley says : 



Agnosticism, 49 

" If a man asks me what the politics of the 
inhabitants of the moon are, and I reply 
that I do not know, that neither I nor any- 
one else have any means of knowing, and 
that under these circumstances I declin e to 
trouble myself about the subject, I do noti 
think he has any right to call me a skep- 
tic." Robert Elsmere might with consist- 
ency and excellent common-sense have 
taken a stand like this. Yet no ; he had 
renounced Christ, but he must still concern 
himself with — the politics of the inhabi- 
tants of the moon. Precisely as Matthew 
Arnold was forever doing, he personifies 
all the good in the world with an actual 
wantonness of unfortified assumption, calls 
it by the name of God and insists upon 
pa3dng it reverence. 

There is, Matihew Arnold long ago 
declared, a " power not ourselves which 
makes for righteousness," and it has al- 
ways seemed to me that just such enemies 
as this talented and facile writer are at 
once the most polite and most irritating 
of any with v/hom agnosticism is called 
upon to deal. Matthew Arnold belonged 
to that type of essayist and controversial- 
ist who is wrecked and enfeebled by the 
very "culture" of which he is so impas- 



so Agnosticism. 

sioned a convert. He diluted his own abil- 
ities into feebleness by mixing them with 
dilettanteism. It might be said of him 
that his future fame, unlike Keats's, has 
been written not so much in water as in 
Arnold-and-water. Born under the Oxon- 
ian' shadow of episcopacy, possessing a 
father whom his '' Literature and Dogma" 
must have struck as the riot and carnival 
of heterodoxy, Matthew Arnold was never 
able to welcome those honest doubts which 
his own width of intellect had summoned. 
The age forced him to weigh, to sift, to 
investigate reverend things ; but he did so 
a conire cceiir, and always with vivid mem- 
ories of how his youth had treasured their 
sacredness. Agnosticism, pure and sim- 
ple, had for him a violence of emphasis 
that set his teeth on edge. It was ex- 
tremely unfortunate for the gentleman's 
teeth — rather more so than for agnosti- 
cism. H e was a man born e itlier too early 
or too la te. Perhaps it had best be said of 
him that he was born too late, for, taking 
him all in all, he would have made a much 
better Church of England dignitary than 
the agnostic he is sometimes incorrectly 
called. 
\ To state that there is a " power not our- 



Agnosticism. 5 1 

selves which makes for righteousness" is to \ 
postulate the undemonstrable. It has al- 
ways been the favorite method of Matthew 
Arnold and men who resemble him, to let 
sentiment pose on the pedestals of their 
overtlirown gods. If there be such a 
power, what is it ? Does it really exist 
outside the consciousness of man ? If so, 
can its existence be proven, or partly 
proven, or even vaguely revealed ? Provided 
my neighbor^nd I cji oose to l ive an up - 
right and sinless life, what is the_power 
not ourselves that leads us_to d^ so ? Isjiot 
thT^ower essentially of and in ourselves ? 
Is it not a result of our respective relation- -^ 
ships with the men and women around us ? 
Imagine that the planet contained but a 
single human being, and lo, the moral or 
unmoral acts that he could commit would 
be reduced to almost a minimum ! Even 
suicide would not be criminal, for in put- 
ting an end to his solitary life this lone 
creature would wound no kinsman or friend, 
he would break no dear ties, deal grief to no 
loving hearts, bring shame upon no house 
or clan. But give this lonely denizen of 
earth a single companion, and at once new 
moral and unmoral conditions arise. Say 
that his companion is feminine, and that the 



52 Agnosticism. 

Adam who now finds himself in the society 
of an Eve is called upon to perform a hun- 
dred little acts of protective kindliness 
which she in turn reciprocates by gentle 
sympathies peculiar to her sex. Of neces- 
sity a new order of moral conduct has 
been established. There are acts good and 
evil which this pair can mutually wreak 
upon one another. And then, if we in- 
crease our duo by one, two, three, or say 
ten individuals, how complicated the rela- 
tions will become! We have the begin- 
ning of a society ; and in a society all vir- 
tue and all wrongdoing must depend upon 
the~aK rFin~~of~dereTrent relations between 
Itsjnembers. 

Here, then, is where the pseudo-liberalism 
of such thinkers as Matthew^ Arnold, after 
leaving the beaten path of Christianity^ 
swings back to its monotheism and its 
pietism by another route. This is what 
Robert Elsmere does in the engaging novel 
of that name. He confuses his desire for 
a celestial and infinite Friend (whom he 
has accepted in the place of a lost Christ) 
wath the meagre and insufficient proofs 
afforded by nature and all ethnologic 
history that any such occult potency lives 
outside of space and time. Other men as 



Agnosticism. 53 

brave and fine as he have had the same 
desire and yet have separated it from the 
perceptive pusii of tiieir brains as they 
would winnow chaff from wheat. Experi- 
ence is forever teaching us that the gulf\ 
between what v/e want and v/hat we get \ 
here below the visiting moon is indeed 
abysmal. Into that abyss the real agnostic 
unflinchingly gazes. Elsmere had so gazed 
as well, but had grown foolishly fascinated 
by the bodiless and tricksy sprites that 
seemed to float through its uncharted 
vacuum. 

An objection often made to agnosticism 
by persons of penetration and scholarship 
is that it destroys without replacing, and 
that he only destroys who can replace. In 
other words, religion, as these excellent 
people claim, is mutable but ineradicable ; 
you cannot take it away from the human 
race in one form without substituting it in 
another. Worship has always been and 
will always be. Agnosticism is not wor- ' 
ship, but simply negation. It can never 
satisfy the cravings of mortality ; it can 
never be made to stand for the rolling 
organ, the stately altar, the chanted hymn, 
the curling incense, the prayerful genuflec- 
tion. . . . Now, the truth is, all such dissent 



54 Agfiosticism. 

is founded upon a single error — that of sup- 
posing manki nd has an j_ natural tendency 
to worship at all. In his barbarous condi- 
tion^hrs-WTrrship is grovelling, and shows 
clearly the terrorism which has induced it. 
Afterward fear changes to awe, and with 
many impressionable persons (these being 
chiefly women) a kind of love is generated, 
perfervid, idolatrous, tinged by hysteria. 
But let us imagine that all religious peo- 
ple in the world could to-morrow become 
absolutely certain this god whom they 
venerate was himself but a portion of nature, 
subject to its laws and powerless to alter 
/ them by the least fraction of an infringe- 
ment. What would then result ? Would 
not all this zealous 'love' depart on the 
instant ? Would not the monk slip off his 
shirt of serge, and the nun forego her fasts ? 
' God is love,' say the churchmen. It 
\ would be equally true, judging from what 
/ life shows us, to declare that ' God is hate.' 
But truer than either would it be to main- 
\ tain that ' God is fear.' We_canno^eally 

o\ love an incorporeal d ream , a fantasy [m^ 
palpable .as^mopnlight. We may love the 
idea of loving it, and cultivate in ourselves 

o / that delicate or robust sort of frenzy which 
is to all religion what its greenness is to a 



Agnosticism. 55 

leaf; but the effort of evolution is rather to 
.produce in man a complete discontinuance 
of prostration before unknowable finalities. 
A man's home is all the church he needs. 
AVife and children make charming choris- 
ters and acolytes. He can find plenty of 
spiritual elevation, if so disposed, in min- 
istering to the needs and comforts of his 
fellows. There is more m^erit and import 
in one charitable act than in the hallelujahs 
and hosannas of a mighty concourse. 
Prayer is merely a refinement of fetishi sm. 
Herbert Spencer says that volumes could 
be written on the impiety of the pious ; he 
might have added that volumes could also 
be written on the idiocy of prayer. To 
call god omniscient, omnipotent, an all-lov- 
ing and all-merciful father, one moment, 
and the next, perhaps, implore him to save 
a treasured child in the agonie_s of croup or 
meningitis — who is there that does not see 
the mockery of such a contradiction ? 

It v/ould be hard to conceive of a more 
peaceful state of things for the world at 
large than that which would result from a 
cessation to think at all concerning the un- 
knovv^able and the beginning to accept some 
pantheistic creed like Spinoza's. Incessant 
dread of what may be the life to come has 



56 Agnosticism. 

•J often caused neglect of the concerns and 
demands of life here. If we knew to-mor- 
row for a certainty that death meant an 
eternal falling asleep, we should doubtless 
busy ourselves much more than w^e do with 
that term of wakefulness allotted to us. 
As John Stuart Mill has most tellingly said, 
there is horror in the idea of dying, solely 
because our minds insist upon fancying 
that we should continue conscious after 
ceasing to breathe — as if any such phase 
Avere possible as that of being dead ! Of 
course the actuality of death as a dark 
human ill could never be argued away. It 
is not so much that we feel the ego decay- 
ing, weakening, and at last ending, as that 
we are doomed before our own demise to 
look on those whom we love or admire 
while they fade before our sight. Death, 
howsoever we rationally consider it, is a 
curse, not alone because it visits us in 
countless ghastly shapes and because v/e 
are never sure what fierce sufferings its 
visits will entail, but because it constantly 
tears from us those whom we love under 
circumstances of the most immature and 
ill-timed quality. If we could all live to be 
so old that death would affect us as ex- 
treme ripeness affects a fruit, causing it to 



J 



Agnosticisvi. 5 7 

drop from its bough after completing a 
period of progressive and harmonious 
thrift, the dolor and exaction would be far 
less apparent. But even X^i^xi pallida mors 
would not be stripped of its worst repul- 
sion, for there are many old people who 
yet cling to life after senility has brought 
them its deepest wrinkles, its most halting 
footsteps. " Live sanely," say the hygien- 
ists, "and you will die happily." But this 
counsel is the most fallible of apothegms, 
for there are thousands who must live not 
only in the sanest way but with the rigid- 
est self-denial in order to live at all, be- 
cause of inherited maladies. Even agnos- 
tics will sometimes tell you that perpetual 
life on this planet would be wearisome to 
them ; but what man or woman could will 
to die if health and the companionship of 
a few loved ones were vouchsafed him ? To 
live on like Zanoni or the AVandering Jew 
would indeed prove a torment ; but pro- 
vided certain dear existences could be 
healthfully and vigorously prolonged to- 
gether with our own, what paradise ever 
sketched by the most dazzling poetic fancy 
could equal the loveliness of this orb in 
which we now dwell ? Harsh winters may 
prevail upon certain tracts of it ; angry 



58 Agnosticism. 

tempests may pour their liquid and electric 
rage upon it ; the tumbling domains of its 
ocean may abound with shipwreck ; heat 
ma}^ often parch its meadows, and drouth 
may turn its rivers to arid hollows of sand; 
but the glorious beauty of our planet, its 
charms of rock, sea, field, foliage, land- 
scape, are an unending consolement and 
delight. The extraordinary reputed visions 
of John in the isle of Patmos are as noth- 
ing to it, nor could our intelligence evolve 
any conceivable picture in which both col- 
ors and lines, howsoever newly commin- 
gled, are not borrowed from^jtsjjwn. No ; 
immo7taTrt5nTereorr~earth, under the cir- 
cumstances just named, could not well fail 
ot enjoyment. The very persons who now 
shudder at the prospect of its ennui would 
hardly fail to choose it if given a chance. 
At any rate, dismay might result to any- 
one who counted too rashly upon the cer- 
tainty of their refusal. 

Say that some youth were brought up in 
absolute ignorance of all the bitterness and 
melancholy with which religion has associ- 
ated death. Let us suppose that he had 
grown to regard death simply as a tender 
peace, a blessed rest after toil, a slumber 
which indeed "knits up the ravell'd sleave 



Agnosticism. 59 

of care." Then say that sudden tidings 
came to him, at the age of twenty or there- 
abouts, which entirely upset all his former 
deductions. Thus far, perhaps, he had 
seen a parent or a sister die. Pain had 
preceded dissolution, making its ultimate 
repose all the more grateful, and he had 
joined with others in the relief that such 
emancipation and exemption produced. 
But now, abruptly, he learns of the fright- 
ful things that man has been for many 
years believing about death. The ghastli- 
ness of Hell, the forlornness of Purgatory, 
and the tedium of an interminable Heaven 
all rise before him. Orthodoxy seizes 
him by one hand, bigotry by the other, 
and no wonder if he recoils terrified, dis- 
gusted, from the contact of each. It would 
not be strange if he were to go mad from 
the shock of his discovery, provided he 
became a convert to any of the creeds it 
has laid bare. After years of entire mental 
calm he has been beset by turmoil and 
vexation. Agnosticism is his only refuge, 
end if he takes it he may there find at 
least a similitude of the contentment he 
knew before. 

Of course this instance is only a supposi- 
titious one. But the imagination can easily 



6o Agnosticism. 

deal with it, and it might be real enough 
were any human being educated like the 
individual whom I have fancied. Agnos- 
ticism would sponge the slate clean, and 
thus wipe away ever}'' past impression and 
prejudice. To state that it must replace 
what it has destroyed is idle verbiage, for 
to require that it shall replace one super- 
stition by another would mean that it 
should bring the recurrence of captivity 
instead of a new and unique liberation. If 
I tell my friend that he has in his pocket i 
a counterfeit banknote I am not compelled / 
to give him genuine money as the price of/ 
my news. The great mistake of those who 
condemn and oppose agnosticism is iheir 
stubborn insistence that it shall build some 
sort of new church, establish some sort of 
new priesthood. This mistake is natural 
enough, and quite pardonable considering 
its source. Agnosticism pretends to be 
nothing in the way of a new religion; you 
might as well ask it to explain itself as ask 
the sunshine that pierces a cloud-swathed 
sky after days of gloom and storm. It is 
the reasoning faculty of humanity grown 
an assertion instead of an abnegation, a 
sound instead of a silence, a courage in- 
stead of a cowardice. Such writers as Mr. 



Agnosticism. 6 1 

Frederic Harrison, Mr. W. H. Mallock, 
and others of either a sentimental or an 
infatuated turn, wholly fail to comprehend 
that the sense of being free from all codes 
and restrictions invented by human credu- 
lity alone, is at once exhilarant and fortify- 
ing. It may be said that certain minds 
cannot do without the religions of churches ; 
if so, there is no objection to the possessors 
of these minds continuing to thumb pray- 
er-books. But others of hardier mould, of 
firmer fibre, will prefer the one large 
republic of rationalism to the little mon- 
archies and duchies of orthodoxy. Profes- 
sor Huxley has well called this latter '* the 
Bourbon of thought." And he adds : " It 
learns not, neither can it forget; and 
though at present bewildered and afraid to 
move, it is as willing as ever to insist that 
the first chapter of Genesis contains the 
beginning and the end of sound science, 
and to visit with such petty thunderbolts 
as its half-paralyzed hands can hurl those 
who refuse to degrade nature to the level 
of primitive Judaism." 

We near the birth of a new century, and 
it may be true that before the world is 
a hundred years older marvellous effects 
will have accrued from the persistent and 



62 Aisnostiiisin 



undaunted efforts of science. Possibly 
agnosticism will then almost have changed 
into a certain kind of gnosticism ; before 
many more centuries have elapsed we are 
led to trust that it will surely have so 
changed. If the denizens of Mars were 
actually signalling to us, as that Italian 
astronomer is reported not long ago to 
have claimed that they are, and if anything 
like interplanetary communication were 
established between Mars and ourselves, 
this event would really be no more extraor- 
dinary than others brought about by men 
like Newton, Franklin, Fulton or Edison. 
If our descendants master the secret of 
death and wring immortality from nature, 
these acts will be only analogous to what 
man is already doing. Toward such a 
millennial result every loyal agnostic will 
have given his share. He who has lifted 
but a single stone of it still helps to build 
the pyramid. What a debt do we owe to 
the ancestors that freed us from supersti- 
tion's trammelling tyrannies ! A like debt 
will our successors owe to us in the ages 
unborn. This realization must content the 
agnostic. ' It is a lofty one, and it is 
chastely unselfish as well. He cannot say 
that he has no good cause for thanks ; he 



/ 



Agnosticism. 63 

has been saved from temporizing and 
makeshift ; he lias escaped the siUiness of 
Theosophy, '' Cliristian Science," " spirit- 
ualism," an d like tawdry lu res t o the fancy 
aiidjthe^ensfis ; he has stooped his lips to 
the crystal waters of pure knowledge and 
found there a draught far wholesomer and 
more flavorous than any sacramental wine 
ever served by foolish priests ! 

Agnosticism, it might be said, kneels 
before a mighty door, in whose huge lock 
is a massive, rusted key. Year after year 
she bruises her hands trying to turn the 
key ; again and again she has moved it a 
little — but only a little, always. She does 
not know what lies beyond the door ; she 
does not profess, she does not even ask, to 
know. But it is the door of human life, 
and beyond it is infinity. Though her 
hands are crimson with blood and their 
flesh is torn to the bone, she will never 
desist from her task. She may faint for a 
time, but she will not die, for her other 
name is Truth-Seeker, and that means t,.^ 
imperishability. And now and then, while 
she strives with all her power to turn the 
monstrous key, her teeth will clench them- 
selves and she will defiantly murmur : " Not 
if it takes ten thousand years will I ever 



64 Agnosticism. 

cease to struggle, until the key has been 
swung round in its lock and the door has 
been flung open!" 

She does not grow old with the years, 
either, this obstinate Agnosticism. Time 
brings her strength instead of weakness, 
and though she is very old she is yet 
younger to-day than in the period of 
Lucretius. Will she fail in her supreme 
design ? It may be. But no matter ; she 
will have striven ! 






THE ARROGANCE OF OPTIMISM. 



Not very long ago the present writer had 
occasion to examine a criticism in the New 
York Times which dealt with a recent novel 
by Mr. Edgar Saltas. This novel, as many 
readers will remember, had attracted at- 
tention because of its chiselled phrases 
and diamond-like epigram. It was not, 
however, a book which might be expected 
to please everybody, and perhaps its young 
author was far from anticipating that it 
would. But possibly, on the other hand, 
he was not prepared to hear, as the acid 
newspaper critic soon informed him, that 
he had been presenting ^' in an ugly bou- 
quet the poison-weeds that Schopenhauer 
and Von Hartmann cultivated." And then, 
almost immediately afterward, this impla- 
cable person went on to declare that Mr. 
Saltus was " imbued with the most horri- 
ble of all human dementia." and that he 

6; 



66 The Arrogance of Optimism, 

had written a work which, "as a romance, 
drips pessimism." 

Such assertions as these are beginning to 
have a very old ring. It is now a good, ap- 
preciable length of time since the genuine 
agnostic was successfully pulverized by the 
wrathful pulpiteer. He is not pulverized 
any more ; occasionally he is shrieked at 
after the style of Mr. Talmage, whose well- 
known energy in this capacity has long ago 
become for thousands an amusement as 
purely national as that of base-ball or roll- 
er-skatmg! StTTTTTKe agnostic and the pes- 
simist are not by any means necessarily one. 
The agnostic may be, and not infrequently 
is, an optimist of sunny and even roseate 
outlook. He will tell you that because the 
roots of all earthly progress are wrapped 
in obscurity, and because the goal toward 
which the mighty steps of evolution ad- 
vance is veiled by unknowableness, that is 
no reason for despair of the " one far-off di- 
vine event" which Tennyson's verses have 
prophesied so beautifully. He may even 
inform you of how his own religious uncer- 
tainty and insecurity do not forbid him to 
hope, trust, and at times feel almost confi- 
dent that the entire vast system of the uni- 
verse is governed by an intelligence wholly 



Tlie Arrogance of OptiDiisui. 6^/ 

beneficent and gracious — one whose appar- I 
ently cruel deeds are disguised mercies t 
and whose seeming enmity hides a love 
which our future immortality sfiall both 
comprehend and applaud. The modern 
agnostic has a logical and consistent right 
to this attitude if he can sincerely assume 
it. But he has not the right to treat with 
arrogance the opposite views and opinions 
of the pessimist, nor is he often found in 
the employment of any such mischievous 
and ill-advised tactics. All that he leaves 
for the religionists, the orthodox believers, 
the zealots of a '' revealed " faith. And it 
must be admitted that even in this age of 
toleration the poor pessimist has a rather 
unpopular and dreary time of it. A rat set 
upon by a terrier might expect about as 
much sympathy from unmerciful bystand- 
ers as he receives from the majority of his 
contemporaries. A great many sensible 
men dismiss his creed with a sneer as silly 
in the extreme ; it is no less a triviality to 
them than theosophy would be to Mr. Hux- 
ley or spiritualism to Mr. Lecky, A great 
many good and sensible women turn from 
it with a shudder as "hopeless," "despair- 
ing," and "sinful." An enormous number 
of ignorant or half-educated people, if they 



68 The Arrogance of Optimistn. 

regard it at all, do so with contemptuous 
aversion. Then there are those of all classes 
who insist that the pessimist does not be- 
lieve what he professes to believe — that he 
is attitudinizing, posing, and that every- 
body ought to /aire son possible in the way 
of frowning him out of such folly. These 
methods of treatment, when considered 
without prejudice or bias of any sort, are 
best defined by a single word — arrogance. 
They savor of precisely the same spirit as 
that which was manifested, only a few years 
ago, toward everj^body who presumed to 
doubt the inspiration of Scripture. Nowa- 
days a man can be an agnostic with some 
degree of mmndane comfort, but the lot of 
the pessimist has not yet been similarly 
favored. I have observed that his great- 
est enemy, as in the case of Mr. Saltus, 
is the newspaper. This exults in having 
its fling at the writer or thinker who dares 
to "look on the dark sides of things" or 
to " don green spectacles " — both of which 
idioms flow from the editorialist's pen with 
a glibness that bespeaks long practice in 
their use. It is an easy matter, surely, to 
write down anything in this way, from a 
political measure to a pot of Recamier 
Cream, from an execution by electricity to 



TJir Arrogance of Optiuiisui, 69 

a new Gilbert-and-Sullivan opera. Very 
probably, too, the current newspaper has 
one of its innumerable self-preservative 
** policies " to uphold, since it would never 
do for the average citizen so sharply to 
realize the conTQlete_ _no thingness of thing s 
that he cared no longer for his morning 
and evening journal. And yet the point- 
of-view taken in every cited instance is an 
arrogant one. Expediency may prompt, 
very often, the crushing blows aimed at a 
gloomy system of philosophy; for there are 
many people in the world foolish enough to 
doubt whether the naked 'truth should ever 
be looked on by mortality provided its 
limbs are graceless and its tinges repelling. 
But by far the larger part of these antago- 
nists whom I have mentioned consider 
themselves in duty bound to discounte- 
nance unc heerfu l tenets. It is right and 
godly that they should do so ; it would be 
arrant wickedness to behave otherwise 
than as the wagers of a vigorous crusade 
against such vicious notions. " Bah ! Stuff 
and nonsense !" cries irritated society. 
" This world not a pleasant place to live 
in ? Mankind had far better not have been 
born? Go, preach your rubbish to the 
* cranks * that are not above listening to it!" 



JO The Arrogance of Opiimism. 

All of which has, when coming from the 
lips of society, a truly impressive sound. 
That is, at first. But a little later we might 
find ourselves reflecting that society has had 
a fashion of being obstinately unconvinced, 
as regarded the greatest and most vital 
questions, for a period of several thousand 
years. All history, it might be stated, is 
only a vast record of the mistakes made 
by the masses. Naturally those preachers 
who succeed in getting the hugest mulii- 
tudes to hear them are not merely such as 
thrill their listeners with promises of an 
abundant and beatific immortality, but who 
embellish the vistas of that fortunate pros- 
pect with a most lavish charm of ornamen- 
tation. It might be said of the big public, 
indeed, that such persons as the Rev. Dr. 
Talmage have spoiled them for ordinary 
theological treatment : they are no longer 
satisfied unless their immortality is served 
them, so to speak, with a thick layer of 
icing and a good many plums. Here is the 
sort of pungent encouragement they need, 
and the paragraphs containing it are quoted 
from a sermon delivered by the gentleman 
already named : 

""Friends, the exit from this world, or death, 
if you please to call it, to the Christian is glo- 



The Arrogance of Optijiiisui. 71 

rious expectation. It is demonstratio7i. It is 
illumination. It is sunburst. It is the openi^ig 
of all the windoivs. It is shidting up the cate- 
chism of doubt, and the unrolling of all the scrolls 
of positive and accurate information. . . . It is 
the last mj'stery taken out of bota^iy and astrono- 
my and geology. O, will it not be grand to have 
all qitestions answered! . . . The Bible i7itimates 
that we will t alk with Jesus i n heaven Just 
as a bi ^otherjalksjwith a brother. Now, zahat 
will you ask him first 1 . . . / shall first want 
to hear thetr agedy of his^ Jasthours, and then 
Luke s account of the crucifixion andtJien Mark's 
account of the crucifixiofi and John's account 
of the crucifixion will be nothing, while fro7?i 
the living lips of Christ the story shall be told 
of the gloom that fell, and the devils that arose. 
. . . All heaven will stop to listen until the stoiy 
is done, and every harp will be put dozvn , and 
every lip closed, and all eyes fixed on the Divine 
narrator, until the story is done ; and then, at 
fAcJa p of the ba t on, the e ternal orchestra will 
rouse upj finger on_sir ing of harp, and lips to 
the^jnouth of trujnpet^_there shall jroU forth 
t he oratorio of th e_Messiah.'' 

If there were any refined or cultivated 
people who took this kind of flamboyant 
materialism at all seriously, they might be 
pardoned for feeling that an eternity of 



72 TJie Arrogance of Optimisnt. 

such proceedings would prove quite the 
reverse of celestial. But that people with 
no refinement or cultivation should dis- 
cover latent "comfort" in talk of so en- 
tirely whimsical a character only serves to 
illustrate what a particularh/ small minor- 
ity of votes the pessimistic person could 
ever be able to command. On every side 
he would seem to have the inherent o-^/W<?V^ 
c(Eur of humanity against him. This con- 
dition of affairs, let it once more be pointed 
out, clearly exhibits the arrogance of op- 
timism. What that tendency wills to be- 
lieve, it does believe. It refuses tq jhink 
that life is not worth living, and it thus re- 
fuses in the face of myriad facts indicated 
by the rigid and unerring finger of science. 
No assertion is made that this arrogance is 
one just now to be avoided or lived down ; 
it may, in fact, be inseparable from the race 
as tlius far evolved, and constitute that very 
" will to live " without wl ikh, as Schopen- 
hauer asserts, there would be no organic or 
even inorganic existence whatever. But 
viewed from the standpoint of him who 
opposes it determinedly, it is arrogance, 
nevertheless. For while the pessimist can 
give countless proofs that life is a curse, a 
snare, a bewilderment, a disappointment. 



TJie Arrogance of Optimism. 73 

an affliction, the optimist can give no cor- 
respondingly valid proofs to the contrary. 
No design is now proposed either to endorse 
or condemn optimism, but merely to define 
it. The optimist may say, and veraciously 
enough, that under given conditions of 
happiness or contentment he holds life to 
|je amply worth living. But the pessimist 
refuses to deal solely with those conditions. 
He insists upon looking at life as alto- 
gether an impersonal, un-individual affair. 
He weighs its aggregate of unsolicited 
misery against its aggregate of reaped and 
garnered joy, and concludes that the former 
far outbalances the latter. 

The pessimist, in his purely unemotional 
role of scientist, can no more be despised 
than any other dispassionate taker of sta- 
tistics. If he shouts anathemas against the 
optimist he at once ranks himself among 
the great throng of inexact and therefore 
untrustworth}^ thinkers. He must either 
be rational and credible or he swiftly be- 
comes absurd. He has already been called 
absurd by legions of alert detractors. Can 
he prove that such vilifiers are menda- 
cious? What are his real renseignements'i 
In which avenue of reputable thought or 







74 77/^ Arro^aucr of Opt lit lis in. 

philosophy can lie find his hardy alUes of 
argument ? 

He will answer 5^ou, if he be a pessimist 
of unblemished and invulnerable honesty, 
that he finds every known aid in the vivid, 
austere rank-and-file of human experience. 
*' I am not a believer in any ' revealed ' re- 
ligion," he will tell you. *' I set my Bible 
and my Koran on the same shelf of my li- 
brary, and if the slightest patrician differ- 
ence exists between their separate bindings, 
that is a question which entirely refers it- 
self to the orthodoxy or the liberalism of 
my bookseller. I obs erve life with an at - 
tentive but u n biassed gaze ." 

"And you see in life," instantly responds 
the adverse auditor, "innumerable pleas- 
ures, benefits, blessings, mercies. You 
cannot deny this. You say that life is not 
worth living, and yet you, this particular 
pessimist whom I now address,* are rich 
in worldly goods, unassailed as to reputa- 
tion, possessed of a wife who not merely 
adores you but who piques your vanity 
enjoyably by being the favorite of all whom 
she meets. You have children who are 

* A prosperous member of society is here inten- 
lionally specified. 



The Arrogance of Optimism. 75 

straight and tall and beautiful, and who 
look on the heaviest task as merest leis- 
ure provided you approve its onus and its 
discipline. Your friends group about you 
and esteem you. You breakfast with dis- 
cretion ; you sup with sanity. You have 
learned long ago the wisdom of abstemi- 
ousness; you ar e_the despai r of your family 
physici an, whose fat income of dollars can 
secure no augment from your exasperat- 
ing prudence. The worn and hackneyed 
interrogatory of cut bono has no meaning 
for your ears ; you live without a misfor- 
tune ; your very sleep is undisturbed by 
even so much as an agreeable dream. 
Your exemption from an hour, a minute 
of distemper, weakness, indisposition, is 
not the least of all these favors. Can 
you truthfully tell me that simply with 
such complete freedom from all physi- 
cal aches and pains you do not congratu- 
late yourself on being the possessor of a 
human existence ? Can you truthfully as- 
sert that you would rather not have been at 
all than be as you are ? Nullity, non-exist- 
ence, is, I admit, inconceivable to human 
consciousness in a subjective way. If you 
had never been born you would never have 
known even the peaceful serenity of not 



76 TJie Arroi^'aucc of Optimism. 

having breathed ; you would simply have 
been (if one may presume to say it) a 
minus quantity in the enormous equation 
of our terrestrial algebra. But would you 
have preferred extinction to your present 
sojourn upon the planet named Earth ? 
Are not the loves you have felt worth lov- 
ing? Is not the music you have heard 
worth hearing ? Are not the paintings and 
sculptures you have seen worth seeing ? 
Have not the numberless complexities of 
human character with which circumstance 
has associated you been worth exploring 
and scrutinizing? Plainly, candidly, as 
man to man, do you not think the whole 
problem of life has been one which you 
would have chosen to confront, provided 
you had been a naked spi-it on the borders 
between chaos and order, with volition 
enough to decide between annihilation or 
creation, consciousness or cerebral blank ?" 
'• I grant all that you say," answers the 
pessimist thus directly addressed. *' I am 
a happy husband, a happy father : I am 
the possessor of wealth ; all the pleasures 
that environment may bestow upon me are 
mine. My heart beats with an equal stroke ; 
my digestion waits on appetite ; I have my 
book-shelves lined with the masterpieces in 



The Arrogance of Optiiiiisni. yj 

literature of the immortal dead ; I cannot 
complain that I have been visited with a 
single ill of the many to which flesh is heir. 
And yet I am miserable. I do not accept 
life ; it has been forced upon me. I go to 
my bed, I awake from my repose, with one 
immitigable sensation — despair. " 

"But why do you despair?" comes the 
query. 

" Why } Can you ask me ? I am under 
a rigid death-sentence. It is true that all 
my human encompassment shares the same 
bitter doom of threat. But that is no com- 
fort to me. If I had been a condemned 
prisoner waiting for execution it would 
afford me no solace that hundreds of others 
near me had been similarly tre:ited. Im- 
mortality? I know nothing about it. You 
tell me that a certain book, written centu- 
ries ago, abounds in hope and assurance of 
it. But I reject the evidence of ihat book. 
I cannot adjnit that it is divinely hTspired. 
I know that a man named Polycarp said 
that it was, and another man named Euse- 
bius, and another man named Irenaeus. 
But I reject the evidence of these witnesses. 
They were born in an age that was bale- 
fully fertile in the most odious of supersti- 
tions. I have only the frailest of proofs 



7 8 The Arrogance of Optimism. 

that even such a man as Jesus Christ ever 
existed. But if he did exist I can gain no 
consolation from legendary statement that 
he was the son of a benign overruling 
deity. You speak of the happiness that is 
afforded me by the society of my wife. It 
is true that I adore her — that every linea- 
ment of her visage, every curve of her form, 
is unspeakably dear to me. And yet I have 
never known the untrammelled delight of 
loving her for the sweet, winsome woman 
she is. My adora tion for her has ever bee n 
mingled with terror. I mean the terror of 
'losirig~hef: You7~air~optimist, would de- 
clare this an ' unhealthy ' mood. You 
would affirm it to be the ' borrowing of 
trouble.' Easy phrases, my friend ! And 
yet I have lain awake at night with the be- 
loved form of my wife near me, and shud- 
dered at the thought of my awful solitude 
if death should rid me of her priceless 
compan}'- ! You remonstrate with me, you 
of the sunny mind, the imperishable op- 
timism. 'Why,' you ask, 'should I dream 
of horrors where none are to be found ?' 
Yet pause, my genial-souled friend. A 
month ago my next-door neighbor v/ould 
stop me in the street to clasp my hand 
with eager amity. He was the picture: 



The A rrogance of Optimism. yc) 

of rugged ness then — only a month ago ! 
In his cheek health blushed, in his eye 
health kindled. His wife, who worshipped 
him, had said to me : 'I am so happy be- 
cause my husband has no ailment, because 
he is unharmed by the least bodily ill.' 
...Yesterday I saw that wife. Her attire 
was one blackness of mourning. Her 
lip trembled as I took her hand. Life 
to her had suddenly become a torture. 
Why should it not so become to me, at any 
hour, at any instant? I fold my arms all 
the closer about my own wife in realizing 
the possibility of a like calamity ; but my 
love is none the less mingled with fear. 
What should I do if she were torn from 
me? Could I take up again the burden of 
living? No, no ; as I v.'atch her live face it 
seems impossible that she should be made 
mute and irresponsive to this devotion I 
hoard for her, inexhaustible, the sweet 
miserly accrument of conjugal years ! And 
my children ! How I love them ! They are 
she ; they are even more ; the guileless 
egotism of fatherhood invests their treas- 
ured vitality. I press my lips to my daugh- 
ter's lips, to the lips of my son, with a 
passion different from yet even more sacred 
than the ecstasy of manhood's early love. 



8o TJie Arroga)ice of Optiviism. 

And yet they, my children, are menaced 
by the same dreadful threat ! Yesterday 
Agnes told me that her heart pulsated too 
rapidly ; I placed my hand upon her bosom 
with a sense of unspeakable anxiety. 
Yesterday Harold said to me, ' Father, I 
have a headache.' My touch upon his 
brow seemed so cold to myself that I feared 
lest he might shrink from it. ^ Idle self- 
tormentings !' cry you, my optimist friend. 

And v et we bo th know that Nature is 

pitiless. My love for my offspring is not so 
large — immeasurable though I feel it ! — 
as the deadly ambuscaded forces of ever- 
watchful, ever-treacherous death! M}^ Ag- 
nes, my Harold, are well ; my worriment 
was nonsense. Oh, yes, I admit it.. .but 
a coffin was lately carried out of a house 
in the next street to mine, and in it lay a 
youth of Harold's age, smitten by pneu- 
monia. A few streets further away there 
was another funeral last week ; a young 
girl, just the age of my Agnes, had died of 
diphtheria. Oh, it is all mere 'croaking' 
to speak as I speak now. But what jn ay a 
human soul do with all its love if it cannot 
t>e ^he guardian and warde r of tha t Jove's^ 
perpetujt}'? I tell myself that I should go 
mad if I lost mv wife or mv son or my 



The Arrogance of Optimism. 8i 

daughter. And yet others, on every side 
of me, survive disasters as keen and strin- 
gent. Perhaps I would survive them, too 
...I don't know... I only know that I would 
infinitely have preferred not being born 
into this world at all than being born 
into it with the dear, sweet weight and 
burden of what I now must bear ! Are 
the joy and satisfaction of possessing kin- 
dred as treasured as my own commensu- 
rate with the stern and persevering fear of 
their possible loss ? I answer, No. And I 
answer it not only from the depths of my 
intellect but from the depths of my love !" 
How can the optimist answer a plaint 
like this ? He cannot rationally assert that 
the pessimist puts forward one illogical 
claim. He may laugh with as blithe a 
mirth as Hebe's at the fabled banquets of 
Jove. He may point to the sun and revel 
in its sfolden ardors. But he must accede 
that night follows, howsoever the jubilance 
and splendor of day may tarry. The arro- 
gance of optimism must at certain times 
make itself felt to him, even though he de- 
nies that it has been exerted. He, like the 
pessimist, has loved ones. The stealthy 
and irreversible advance of age cannot be 
disputed by him. He does not grow old 



82 TJie Arrogance of Optimism.. 

half so gracefully as he professes to do. 
His hair does not turn into the sarcastic 
silver of decay, his lim bs do not s ec rete a 
subtle_chal k in their xoiuLa, his forehead 
does not develop the immedicable wrinkles 
and crow's-feet, his teeth do not turn ache- 
haunted and loose, without his knowledge 
and sure comprehension of such, piteous 
disintegration. He may "philosophize"; 
he may don a bold front against the grad- 
ual, loitering advance of the sure destroyer ; 
and yet in his inmost heart he recognizes 
and bitterly appreciates the slow, terrible 
change. 

There is some uplifting force, affirms the 
disciple of Schopenhauer, which enables 
us to eat our daily meals (provided vv^e are 
among the limited though fortunate num- 
ber of those who can procure them) and 
bear a comparatively stout heart along with 
us during the brief passage between cradle 
and grave. What, you ask, is that peculiar 
undemonstrated force ? " It is," the Scho- 
penhauerite will ansv/er you, " * the will to 
live,' the undeniable yet mysterious influ- 
ence that equally causes a violet to spring 
up by the side of a brook and Saturn to 
wheel his awful globe about the sun." 

*' Not so," affirms the Christian, " it is 



The Arrogance of Optiniisni. 83 

God, conscious and supremely intelligent, 
ordering His universe with unrivalled wis- 
dom and abilit3^" The Christian and op- 
timist are, in this case, supposed to be one 
and the same, though many Christians ex- 
ist who are thorough pessimists at heart, 
fighting for dogma with an invincible stub- 
bornness, yet ruling their lives by principles 
and doctrines which the Galilean would 
have held forlornly foolish. But the real 
pessimist will not for a moment hear that 
the least proof of intelHgence is to be found 
among the workings of Nature. '* My great 
reason," he will tell you, " for holding ex- 
istence to be a curse and a bore, is my firm 
conviction that we are, all of us, the m.ere 
puppets of some sightless and wholly mind- 
less Process, which moves us, not whither- 
soever it will but w hith er soev er it must. 
You assure me that above all things there 
is a presiding and prevailing Consciousness. 
But I have no such certainty, and the creed 
to which I cling is in thousands of ways 
more tenable than yours. You affect to 
despise me in the arrogance of your optim- 
ism, and you hurl sentences of Scripture at 
me, such as '■ The fool hath said in his heart, 
There is no God.' But I am not to be dis- 
missed half so easilv as that, Mv doubts 



84 The Arrogance of Optimism. 

will returji to haunt you at many future hours 
of your life, even though you now profess 
so valiantly to despise them. For this 
faith of yours in the complete mercy of your 
God I fail to find half as thorough as you 
yourself would have me think it. The 
arms of optimists like you are not torn away 
any the more easily, I have observed, from 
the forms of their beloved dead because of 
that 'corruptible' which 'must put on in- 
corruption' or that 'house not made with 
hands, eternal in the heavens.' Your sobs, 
at times like these, echo none the less 
drearily than those wrung from the lips of 
the unbelieving. You say that the intense ^ 
physical alteration brought about by death 
is sufficient to create in you this horror, 
this agony. But I cannot at all agree with 
you that it would be thus sufficient, pro- 
vided your faith were as strong as you rep- 
resent. That is a faith, you yourself say, ^ 
which passeth understanding ; it is rooted 
in emotions and longings ; its promises to 
you are copious and priceless. But I can- 
not reconcile your trust with your tears, 
your heavenly confidence with your "very 
earthly lamentation. What if this friend 
who has just breathed his last had come to 
3'ou some day and said: 'I am going into 



The Arrogance of Optimis?n, 85 

a beautiful country, where I shall be ex- 
quisitely happy and whither you shall one 
day follow me'? Would you fall on his »^ 
neck and tremble with suffering? Would 
you seek to detain him from that delightful 
sojourn by every means in your power?... 
Come, now; there is either a grave flaw in 
your well-jointed, oft-vaunted armor of 
faith, or you have deceived both yourself 
and others with regard to its resistance, its 
durability. For it fails to stand the one 
needed test. It is impotent in the face of 
that very calamity which it boasts of under- 
rating. At the door of the tomb it falters 
and loses courage. If I had it I make bold to 
say that I would see joy in t he deadj gan^s 
obsequies, an d resent as irrelevant the 
mournful emblem on In s door-bell . You 
are an optimist, yet you have not the due 
and consistent courage of one when it comes 
to a question of bearing that very ordeal 
which you rebuke me for calling crucially 
severe.... Now, let us see how far this 
same alleged courage will serve you with 
relation to the laws of living— those laws, 
remember, which you name the product of 
a supreme Benignity, ever watchful for 
your welfare. How do you really oppose 
the unpleasant stress of poverty ? By ar- 



S6 The Arrogance of Opiimis^n, 

dent prayer ? I do not deny that you may 
pray devoutly, but do you not also take 
pains to work with industry as well, and to 
exert all your faculties of unsullied trades- 
manship toward the end of gaining a com- 
fortable livelihood? By prayer, too, you 
may seek to rid yourself of countless other 
ills ; but if you should to-morrow discover 
that your cellar was filled with stagnant 
water, would you not instantly resort to 
the services of a competent drainer ? If an 
earthquake should suddenly shake your 
house, would you drop on your knees, or 
would you rush with expedition from the 
doorway ? If y_our child j ell ill to-day _of 
scarlet-fever, would prayer ^rjnedicinejDe 
first in you TL^ arenta l thought ? And yet 
you would denounce as unpardonably 
* godless' the man who should presume to 
speak with you of the inefficacy of prayer. 
The arrogance of optimism would swiftly 
rise in revolt against his theories. I do not, 
be it borne in mind, deny the assertiveness 
of my own pessimism. And yet I seldom 
get even the chance of exploiting it. The 
large mass of ' civilization ' to which you 
belong will rarely accord me that chance. 
You are always crying at me from your 
pulpits, your church-meetings, your popular 



The Arrogance of Optimism. 87 

assemblages of many sorts. When I point 
to John Stuart Mill's essay O71 Nature you 
shudder, and marvel how I can be so ' ma- 
terialistic' And yet, practically, you treat 
Nature as the same implacable foe that I 
treat her. If a sharp wind rushes from the 
north, you button your great-coat over your 
chest. If you read in your sympathizing 
newspapers that several wretched Italian 
immigrants have been detained at quaran- 
tine, reeking with the microbes of cholera, 
you have dismal dreams of a horrified 
Broadway and a demoralized Fifth Avenue. 
You are, in other words, as much of an ac- 
tive, operative pessimist as I am, and the 
only positive difference between us is that 
you orally proclaim an optimism which I 
will not proclaim at all, since I cannot live 
up to it, nor take pleasure in flagellating 
my fellow-creatures with its arrogance — 
its arrogance, on which I am never tired, in 
my present arraignment of you, aggrievedly 
to harp." 

There is no doubt that a so-called 
*' healthy" state of the human mind general- 
ly, if not always, is allied to one of stupidity. 
If we think at all of whence we have come, 
whither we are going, and wherefore we 
are here, we inevitably recoil from that 



I 



88 T/ie Arrogance of Opthnism. 

trinity of mysteries ; and to let our thoughts 
dwell habitually upon any subject invested 
with so much gloomy dissatisfaction and 
unrest is of course an occupation highly 
injurious to happiness. There can be no 
doubt, either, that idiots and animals, when 
freed from bodily pain, are perfectly happy. 
Still, on the other hand, it js not denj ed 
that c onten t men t is incompatible with 
brains, for the simple reason that very 
many persons are as firm-nerved and as 
fearless in their contemplation of le grand 
■pcut-eire as Napoleon was on the eve of 
a battle. But there is no excuse for 
beings thus endowed with perennial forti- 
tude to cast scorn upon others of weaker 
mould ; for if the manifold ills of life keenly 
alarm me and do not disconcert my neigh- 
bor, the point as to whether my agitation 
or his imperturbability is most in order 
must be solely determined by the inimical 
degree of the assailant agency ; and only 
fools will persist in saying that life is not 
pregnant with ills. Wise men may offset 
these ills with blessings, but the latter still 
remain convertible at even a moment's 
notice into their distinct reverse, while 
many of the former, such as old age, death, 
sundering of attached souls, bereavement, 



The Arrogance of Optimism, 89 

the failure of eyesight or hearing, are with- 
out cure, consolation, alleviation. Nor do 
the Latin words, Pidvis et uj?ibra suniits, 
thoroughly convey the surpassing melan- 
choly of human life. Ours is not merely 
a world where we die. It is one in which ^ 
heredity exerts an increasing and inex- 
orable mastery. The edicts of heredity, 
expressed in Biblical phrase by " the sins of 
the fathers . . visited upon the children," 
are too often as tyrannous as any that a 
Nero or a Caligula could devise. Our asy- 
lums and hospitals make harshly plain to 
us the unmerited woes that are visited upon 
generations of mortals. There we may see 
diseases transmitted by progenitors to their 
descendants which entail years of torment 
that the worst despot history can produce 
would have been loath to visit upon his 
guiltless victims. Adults and little children 
alike quiver beneath the lash of these de- 
plorable inflictions. Inherited rheumatic 
gout will twist and distort the limbs of an 
infant from its birth until it has reached 
nine or ten years, and then kill it in the end, 
ruthlessly and with perhaps only a slight 
moribund interval of surcease from exces- 
sive pain. Inherited cancer lingeringly 
slays both saint and sinner with frigid dis- 



90 TJie Arrogance of Opthnis7n. 

regard of either desert or innocence. ThC- 
babe is born to live a week, a_rnonth^_ a yea r, 



and then perish with pangs that make us 
tliankful ils~l^cked_^jidlHaeJEieHLte2ZliItle 



body could cease from breathingwhen it 
did. The middle-aged are flung upon beds 
of misery by some malady which has been 
slowly, insidiously developing within them 
while the}^ labored for the peaceful compe- 
tence which now at last they have just at- 
tained, and no more. The old are stricken 
by the same hideous ailment whicli de- 
stroyed their fathers or mothers at a similar 
age. Heredity has, in its demoniac quiver, 
arrows tipped with a poison more baneful 
than any of which the Borgias ever 
dreamed. 

Nor is this all. The optimist may toss 
his head as merrily and dissentiently as he 
will, but that very "spiritual"' part of us 
whose divine origin he is so fond of extol- 
ling as indestructible, has its throes to en- 
dure, for which no merciful anaesthetic has 
yet been invented by psychologist or meta- 
physician. To love and to be loved in this 
life may present ineffable enjoyment. But 
to love and to be loved are forever forming 
the saddest of non-sequiturs. It is not always, 
by any means, that the intervention of caste 



The Arrogance of Optimism. 91 

and wealth tears two lovers apart from one 
another. Nature, no less than man, has her 
Montague and her Capulet, her Abelard 
and her Heloise. A man adores, worships 
a certain woman, and finds her cold to him 
as marble. A woman is stirred by the same 
unquenchable preferment, and is met by 
the same stolid indifference. Such passions 
as these, thwarted in their very births, are 
at once the marvel and the despair of all 
whom they besiege. They are like birds 
with bleeding and shattered wings ; they 
are powerless to fly, and can only crawl 
along with their smarting burdens. George 
Eliot (whose morality and charily as a 
writer are immense, yet whose pessimism 
is no less a fact to all who have studied her 
faithfully) touches, in '' Daniel Deronda," 
on this wide, eternal reality of the lover's 
unrequited affection. Women hide it more v/ 
than m.en — and suffer more on this account. 
Men have larger means for seeking and 
obtaining forgetfulness. Perhaps very few 
of either sex fail ultimately to heal their 
aching wounds. But when such love as 
theirs has become simply memory, the sting 
that succeeds its disappearance is some- 
times a persistent, if not a poignant one. 
How could we ever so vehemently have 



92 The Arrogance of Opthfiism. 

loved and yet now feel this torpid callous- 
ness in a heart that was once so tremu- 
lously sensitive ? Our love, when we were 
thralled by it, made us feel a sacred kin- 
ship with the stars ; we looked into the red 
bosoms of roses and the balmy chalices of 
lilies, with new eyes for their richness and 
chastity ; our most prosaic tasks took a 
halcyon edge upon their very commonness 
and dulness, like ordinary objects when seen 
through prisms. We pressed our friends' 
hands more warmly than had been our wont, 
because friendship was allied with love, and 
love was a divine melody that every wind 
sang to us, every sunbeam laughed to us. 
...Bat, deserted by all that old, delicious 
exaltation, we ask ourselves what its frenzy 
could have meant or been ? How may we 
any longer call it ideal and poetic when it 
has passed away from us with no more 
ceremony in its quick evanishment than if 
it were an impulse of hunger or a prefer- 
ence of claret over champagne ? Never do 
we seem more clearly to ourselves the tran- 
sient shadows of a void and profitless dream 
than then, in such disillusionized and 
doubly solitary hours ! Shakespeare, held 
by those highest in critical authority as 
the greatest poet that mankind has thus 



TJlc a rrogaiice of Opfintisni 93 

far been called upon to admire, is the 
author of many a pessimistic verse. In- 
deed, it is the belief of that fearless and 
wonderful reasoner, Robert G. Ingersoll 
(himself a profound Shakespearian scholar), v 
that the author of " Hamlet" was a con- 
firmed agnostic and freethinker. Opponents 
of this theory will eagerly seize upon the 
dramatic form of Shakespeare's work as 
ample justification of every " impious" line 
he ever wrote. But how about the " Son- 
nets "? Do they not literally overflow with 
thought such as this : 

" Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake. 
And die as fast as they see others grow; 
A nd nothing Against 'I 'i/ne's scythe can make defence. . . " 

Or again, these meaning verses : 

" Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, 
And make the earth devour her own sv.-eet brood; 
Pluck the keen teetli from the fierce tiger's jaws 
And burn the long-liv'd phoenix in her blood...; 
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime : 
O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow..." 

Or again : 

*' When I consider everything that grows 
Holds in perfection but a little moment, 
That this huge state presenteth naught but shows 
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment..." 



94 The Arrogance of Optimism. 

Or again : 

" Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud; 
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, 
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud..." 

Or, still once again : 

* ' Since brass, nor stone, nor earth , nor boundless sea, 
But sad mortality o'ersways their pov;er, 
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea. 
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?" 

Or, still once again, and the last time, 
though many more similar passages of 
gloom and despondency could be cited, 
let us now reproduce the whole of a son- 
net which has long been famed as one of 
the brightest jewels in this very remark- 
able collection. A more plaintive moan of 
despairing revolt against the entire earthly 
scheme w^as never uttered by any poet, liv- 
ing or dead. 

'* Tired vvitli all these, for restful death 1 cry, — 
As, to behold desert a beggar born, 
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 
And purest faith unhappily forsworn, 
A^nd gilded honor shamefully misplac'd, 
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 
And right protection wrongfully disgrac'd, 
And strength by limping sway disabled, 
And art made tongue-tied by authority, 
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill, 



Tlic Arrogance of Optiinisin. 95 

And simple truth miscaird simplicity. 

And captive good attending captain ill : 

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, 
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone." 

Such denunciations of life, vented by 
Shakespeare, are in the poet's own voice, 
and not that of any portrayed dramatic 
character. The poet here speaks through 
his individual lips, and not those of any 
malign creation like lago or Macbeth. 
" This little life is rounded by a sleep," and 
" All the world's a stage " are but two, as it 
were, among the multitudinous black pearls 
of thought which help to make up that 
other truly royal chaplet. What would the 
modern newspaper say to ideas like these, 
if so illustrious an authority had not uttered 
them ? Here are some words of condein na- 
tion against pessimism, taken a day or tvv^o 
ago from a New York daily journal of 
prominence and power : 

''An author who depicts life in dreary 
colors is sure to exert a most undesirable 
influence over many of his readers. The 
force of this applies to all kinds of Vv-riting. 
Whether a man pens an epic poem or a 
newspaper editorial, the tone of his philos- 
ophy is sure to leave its ultimate effect on 
those who peruse his words. Is it not then 



96 The Arrogance of Optimism. 

incumbent upon an author to shun, as far 
£S possible, that mocking pessimism which 
in our day serves to cover a vast amount of 
mental inability? One word in literature 
by an optimistic thinker is worth ten thou- 
sand by a grumbler, even though the latter 
may adorn his thoughts with the brightest 
gems of wit and poesy." 

The above is a most salient example of 
the arrogance of optimism. This little 
group of sentences may be said to contain 
the same condescension and patronage 
which mark uncounted pages of our current 
newspapers. It is always the same a priori 
course of mingled laudation and damnation 
Why is one word of optimism worth ten 
thousand of pessimism ? If neither manner 
of surveying life can be set aside as in- 
nately false, why should this be upheld and 
applauded while that is decreed to "cover 
a vast amount of mental inability"? Do 
the sonnets of Shakespeare, that mourn so 
eloquently and untiringl}- *' the wreckful 
siege of battering days," perpetrate such a 
flimsy concealment ? Was George Eliot a 
"grumbler' because she wrote that heart- 
breaking story of " Middlemarch," where 
destiny rewards hardly a single noble intent 
or disinterested yearning ? Did the shrewd 



The Arroga)icc of Opt in lis m. 97 

lips of Voltaire lie when they reminded us 
that ' we never live, but are always in expec- 
tation of living'? If, as Montaigne some- 
where axiomatcs, 'ignorance is the mother 
of all evils,' why should it exert "an unde- 
sirable influence " to depict life in "dreary 
colors," when those dreary colors are all 
borrowed from the sure shadows cast by 
every-day occurrences ? Have the stimu- 
lating prophecies and warrants of Christi- 
anity prevented a million cases of madness, 
a million acts of suicide? Allowing all the 
beauty, allurement, pastime, lofty pursuit, 
glorious intoxication of life ^ to be credible 
and tangible, why should its ugliness, re- 
pulsion, disappointment, failure, overthrow, 
receive but furtive glances, as though fable 
had first begotten and fatuity afterward 
exaggerated them ? Is the optimistic fer- 
mentation brought about in unenlightened 
minds by sermons like those of Dr. Tal- 
mage and oihers equal to a tranquil facing 
of verities — a square and honest confront- 
ing of the whole sweet-and-bitter, dark-and- 
bright enigma, and a frank subsequent con- 
fession that both ourlaughterand ourgroans 
are the products of an inscrutable, abysmal, 
tantalizing source ? If I concede your 
right to say that tlic Mediterranean breaks 



98 TJlc Arrogance of Optijuisin. 

with voluptuous cadences on the shores of 
the Riviera, why should you refuse me my 
right to answer that the cyclone is death- 
fully raging in the wilds of Nebraska ? 
But the arrogance of optimism does refuse 
me this right. It chides me and frowns 
upon me when I maintain that Emerson's 
amiable treatise concerning Nature is but 
the complement of John Stuart Mill's dolo- 
rous one, and that while each may be in 
its way undeniable, the first only leaves 
off where the last begins. If optimism 
could disprove the avowals of pessimism it 
would be quite another affair with her. 
But she cannot ; she can only berate and 
abuse them. And yet the professedly buoy- 
ant members of society are the very ones 
who tell you that they have had " oh, such 
a wretched attack of the blues," or that 
they have heard Brown's book is doleful, 
and therefore do not want to read it, since 
there is such an enor7nous amount of sadness in 
life that one cannot escape^ whether he will or 
no. It is usually the person impartially 
observant of life in all her phases who has 
the best time as years crowd upon him. The 
present article offers no plea for pessimism, 
no recommendation of its counsels, no en- 
dorsement of its assumptions and prem- 



The Arrogance of Optiiiiisni. 99 

ises. But a plea certainly is offered for the 
respectful consideration of a doctrine so 
much of which is irrefutable truth. If it 
be not too commonplace, I would suggest 
that the kind of truth we men and women 
want most of all — the kind to live by and 
to die by — i s mid way between these two 
strenuous extremes^ Th^-CiQw n of a per- 
fect education m i ght be def ined as a perfec t 
freed om from prejudice. It is extraordi- 
nary how much of a peculiar sort of preju- 
^ice the optimist of to-day fosters. It 
would seem as if he were only arrogant 
with living pessimists, and forgivingly 
overlooked the sins of all others. We oc- 
casionally find him allowing greatness to 
Voltaire ; he has been known to discredit 
the story that Thomas Paine died in mis- 
eries of repentance, imploring the pardon 
of heaven for his blasphemies. But not to 
faire des exaf7iples v/ith too much prolixity, 
we note that the optimist abides unruffled 
in his contemplation of what are perhaps 
the most daring pessimisms ever put into 
verse. T mean those of Omar Khayyam, 
the Persian astronomer-poet. When, about 
thirty years ago, the late Mr. Edward Fitz- 
gerald rendered these astonishing stanzas 
into admirable English verse, it was curious 



lOO TJie Arrogance of Optimism. 

to observe the popularity they at once se- 
cured. Both here and in England optimism 
was never weary of praising them. It was 
so safe to do so ; Omar had been born seven 
hundred years ago ; there was nothing sac- 
rilegious in hearing the voi:e of material- 
ism at that distance away. And so the op- 
timist would smile to himself as he read of 
the old poet's vie orageuse and the epicurean 
conclusions that he had drawn from it. That 
book, to half the optimists in the land, was 
like a "jolly bank-holiday " to a lot of Lon- 
don clerks. They interchanged shocked 
looks as the}^ read, but with none the less 
avidity they did read — 

"What, without asking, hither hurried ichence? 
And, without asking, ivhither\\\xxx\^^ hence? 

O many a cup of this forbidden wine 
Must drown the memory of that insolence !" 

Of course, they argued, if any modern 
human being, such as Col. Ingersoll, should 
speak in the style of the following quat- 
rain, it would be outrageous to the last 
degree. But then it sounded so much less 
abominable (it sounded so fascinatingly 
quaint, in fact !) when you heard a voice 
pealing forth from a seven-hundred-year- 
old past with such words as these : 



TJic Arrogance of Optimism. lOi 

" Oh, Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin 
Beset the road I was to wander in, 

Thou wilt not with predestined evil round 
Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin !" 

Still, with all the dilettante laxity which 
the optimist is known to have permitted 
himself regarding the perusal of Omar 
Khayyam's Rubdiyat, it is difficult to un- 
derstand how he could quite have steadied 
his nervous system sufficiently for a placid 
consideration of the following — perhaps 
more scathingly tnilitant against accepted 
codes than anything in the whole most un- 
conventional poem : 

"Oh, Thou, who man of baser earth didst make. 
And even with paradise devise the snake, 

For all the sin wherewith the face of man 
Is blackened, m.an's forgiveness give — and lake!" 

I recall that, when Omar Khayyam's little 
book was first published in this country, a 
certain gentleman who had been one of its 
earliest and most enthusiastic readers im- 
parted to me his private suspicions concern- 
ing its actual authorship : " I feel con- 
vinced," he said, " that this ' astronomer- 
poet of Persia ' is a graceful myth, invented 
by the Rev. Edward Fitzgerald himself, in 
order to conceal his own athestic tenden- 
cies." I could not help thinking this a 



102 The Arrogance of Opliiiiisni. 

rather singular course and plan by wliich 
a clergyman should seek to win his baton 
viarechai3.s a poet, and subsequent develop- 
ments proved my friend's hypothesis to 
have been a mistaken one. But I have 
often afterward ruminated upon the gen- 
eral social result of a discovery that the Ru- 
baiyat had really been the work of a Chat- 
terton-like literary impostor. Ah, what re- 
cantations and retractions would have 
poured from the lips of our mortified op- 
timists, if they had been called upon to re- 
gard all these acrid and sinister sayings as 
the outcome of a living, breathing pessimist, 
and not of one that had been romantically 
and picturesquely dead for seven long cen- 
turies ! It is doubtful if Mr. Elihu Vedder 
would have presumed to make those very 
imaginative and captivating illustrations of 
his, which now accompany at least one 
precious edition of the work, and which, 
moreover, in all their bitter and often ter- 
rible beauty, are treasured by optimists of 
every sect, from Roman Catholic to Uni- 
tarian. 

The arrogance of optimism will probably 
cease to exert iiself when it has received 
from evolution a disclosure of its own hy- 
pocrisy. For very few of us can live at 



TJic Arrogance of Optimisvi. 103 

all without being in a measure pessim- 
ists. " Theologians have exausted in- 
genuity," says Ingersoll, '' in finding ex- 
cuses for God." But this is not so bold, 
after all, as the remark of the Frenchman 
who said that the sole excuse for the deity 
^ was ^'- quil n'cxiste pas.'' Still, whether we 
revolt or submit, it is very apt to be one 
and the same with us : we are what George 
Eliot has somewhere called " yoked crea- 
tures with private opinions." None of us 
can afford to sneer at him who looks more 
sombrely than we do at the unutterable 
wretchedness of the world, or at him who 
distrusts more thoroughly than ourselves 
the sinful and selfish races that people it. 
Advancement in knowledge will bring pes- 
simist and optimist nearer together. If 
there are any who refuse sunshine its ra- 
diance, flowers their bloom and odor, hu- 
man love its tenderness and majesty, pity 
its tears and almsgiving, virtue its cleanli- 
ness and candor, justice its righteousness 
and nobility, — if there continue any so par- 
tisan and feeble of judgment as this, then 
optimism may turn didactic to her heart's 
content, and with an unassailable authority. 
In the meantime let her use against the 
" fallacies " of her foe other weapons than 



y 



104 The Arro^^ancc of Optimism. 

those of idle invective. Let her imitate the 
calm methods of science, who condemns 
nothing, sneers at nothing, but accepts, 
investigates, analyzes, utilizes all. You 
cannot make me think malaria, lightning, 
earthquake, rattlesnakes, treason, malice, 
falsehood, meanness are less of the curses 
I know them, because you cry out at me 
that I am a malicious fool, and endanger 
the welfare of life and society by noting 
too close]j,^^su^h^incaiiny^_d^^ 
Neither can I make^^ou think the warble of 
birds, the murmur of streams, the limpid- 
ness of heaven, the flocculence and purity 
of a summer cloud, the exuberance and del- 
icacy of a rose, the mirth and innocence of 
childhood, the dignity and strength of hon- 
est manhood, the rapture of a maiden's first 
love, the sanctity of a mother's protective 
caress, are slighter blessings than I know 
them, because you cry out at me that I am 
a mawkish sentimentalist, and endanger 
the welfare of life and society by dwelling 
with too much emphasis upon these espe- 
cially agreeable phenomena. Some day, 
when their present constituents long have 
been dust, these two inimical factions of 
intellectuality, optimism and pessimism, 
will meet on a common ground — that of 
mutual conr'-- ion and conciliation. Some 



/ 



The Arrogance of Opiiinisui. 105 

day ? And yet who shall dare to dream 
what far grander results that future day 
may accomplish ? Science may then have 
scaled heights which we now hold insu- 
perable for even her dauntless foot. The 
whole order of seeing and believing may 
be changed. What now seems to us finality, 
may then have become the rudimentary 
commonplace of physics. If the twentieth 
century marches along at the same superb 
pace as that of the nineteenth, there is no 
prophesying — there is hardly any fanciful 
guessing, even — vrhat invaluable certitudes 
respecting life, death and the human soul 
vhiy be reached ! Nor is there anything 
millennial, Utopian, impracticable in such a 
deduction. Not so very long ago the mere 
mention of an era in which instantaneous 
submarine communication between Europe 
and America was attainable, would have 
been scoffed at as the wildest of fanatical 
visions. It may be that in the twentieth or 
twenty-first century pessimism and optim- 
ism will be so welded together into a wider 
conception of what is now deemed insolu- 
ble that the ' arrogance ' which this pro- 
test has attempted to exhibit will have 
grown as inconsiderable an issue as many 
a present optimist, after reading thus far, 
will feel disposed to pronounce it. 



THE BROWNING CRAZE. 

Critical surprise has been more than 
once expressed, of late, that in an age so 
militant against the development of the 
poetic spirit, a single man should find him- 
self (and that, too, at an advanced period 
of his life) surrounded, not to say besieged, 
by hosts of ardent admirers. Everybody 
has now heard of the " Browning Craze," 
and it is quite probable that many had 
heard of it while Mr. Robert Browning 
himself was hardly more to them than a 
meaningless name. And yet to the major- 
ity of literary men and women in England 
and America this cult has long been a 
familiar one. Not until perhaps a decade 
ago did it begin to assume its present spa- 
cious proportions. I remember meeting 
devout Browningites at least twenty years 
ago, when almost a boy. And as boys will, 
when their thoughts turn toward the letters 
of their time and land, I soon felt an ambi- 
tious craving to graduate into a Brown- 
ingite myself. 

1 06 



The Brozvumg Craze. 107 

Such a worship then possessed so fasci- 
nating an element of rarity ! It was so at- 
tractive a role for one to give a compas- 
sionate lifting of the brows and say, "No, 
really?" when somebody declared himself 
quite unable to understand the obscure 
author of "Sordello." You knew perfectly 
well that any number of his lines were 
Hindostanee to j^ou, and yet you made use 
of your patronizing pity and your " No, 
really ?" all the same. There is safety in the 
assertion that Mr. Browning has driven more 
pedantic youngsters to unblushing false- 
hood than any other writer in the language. 
All sorts of roads lead to fame, and his, 
oddly indeed, has been the very oblique one 
of an unpopularity which bore superficial 
signs that it was preferred and courted. 
But a deeper glance assures the unbiassed 
observer that this is by no means fact. Al- 
most every poem of the many which he has 
written bears evidence that the attitudina- 
rian has been at work, that the conscious 
trickster has again and again superseded the 
conscientious artist, and that the notoriety 
w^e too often give caprice and whimsicality 
has been aimed after with a studied zeal. 
It is in this way that Mr. Browning inces- 
santly betrays what might be called the 



y 



io8 TJic Bro'iiminz Craze 



^> 



frivolity inseparable from his temperament. 
Take, for example, in "Men and Women," 
his most coherent collection of dramatic 
and lyrical poetry, the profusion of rank 
affectations mingled with their hardy op- 
posites. Indeed, this one book, which is 
by far the most serene, lucid and endur- 
able that he has ever given to the world, 
contains much that art cannot fail to find 
hideous, even repulsive. Scarcely a poem 
is exempt from some shocking flaw. In 
"A Lover's Quarrel," which possesses good 
human touches, if the verse does jerk like 
a sled on a road filmed meagrely with snow, 
we read such rhymed crudity as 

See the eye, by a fly's foot blurred — 

Ear, when a straw is heard 
Scratch the brain's coat of curd ! 

But effects of unpardonable bathos like 
this abound in '' Men and Women." The 
present essay would exceed all allowable 
scope if half of them were quoted. Poems 
which have received rapturous praise fairly 
teem with them. In "The Statue and the 
Bust" (a piece of work so often declared 
faultless) there are obscurities of construc- 
tion for which a school-boy would be rated 
by his teacher. " Master Hugues of Saxe- 



The Browjiing Craze. 109 

Gotha" racks and tortures the most ordi- 
nary ear. " Childe Roland to the Dark 
Tower Came" (another object of devout 
veneration) has little about it that is met- 
rically slipshod, but affects an impartial 
reader, after finishing it, as a lyric literally 
torn from an unwilling talent ; its very u^ 
rhymes have a forced, factitious queerness, 
and its abrupt ending seems to exclaim, 
''Look at my wonderful suggestiveness of 
allegory ! " And we look, if our eyes are 
not bloodshot with the " Browning Craze," 
only to conclude that the entire poem is on 
such mystical stilts as to transcend the 
reach of all sensible interpretation. "Pop- 
ularity," which endeavors to laud the su- 
periority of genius over mere facile aptitude, 
ends with two stanzas regarding '' Hobbs, 
Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes," which few liv- 
ing men of taste would have cared to print 
at all, and none except their creator would 
have cared to offer his public as poetry, 
'•Old Pictures in Florence" repeatedly 
massacres wliat should be a mellifluous 
anapaestic measure, and leaves you as tired 
of its eccentric attitudinizing as if you had 
been button-holed by some loquacious 
rhapsodist in one of the Arno-fronting 
streets. 



no The Browning Craze. 

But it would be idle, on the other hand, 
to deny " Men and Women" both poems 
and passages of poems glowing with merit. 
We find there '^ Evelyn Hope," a bit of pas- 
sion worth careful heed, though overrated 
by its lovers because so massively self- 
satisfied in its transcendentalism. We find 
"Bishop Blougram's Apology," a brilliant 
study of a narrow, glib, specious-tongued 
prelate, and interesting if on no other 
ground than its dramatic exposition of a 
meretricious moralist. We find the tender 
and pathetic " Andrea del Sarto," whose 
sole objection is the mannered and inhar- 
monious blank verse which Mr. Browning 
always employs. We find the fervid little 
"Love among the Ruins," and wish its 
author, so often insolent in his defiance of 
art, had chosen to sing many more times 
like that for the delight of folk unborn. 
We find "Saul," burning with eloquence 
and yet perfectly intelligible, notwithstand- 
ing its cloying pietism. We find "In a 
Balcony," perhaps the best piece of drama 
Mr. Browning has ever written. We find 
"The Last Ride Together," an ardent epi- 
sode of love-making, but lyrically spoiled 
by its far-fetched subtleties of simile and 
illustration. We find "Any Wife to Any 



The Broivnins; Craze, 1 1 1 



'^t> 



Husband," which to read over ten times 
very patiently and studiously is to con- 
vince us that it is fine — and what more of 
critical irony could be heaped on a poem 
than that? We find "Two in the Cam- 
pagna," which begins exquisitely and gets 
labored and befogged toward the end. We 
find "A Grammarian's Funeral," which 
makes the blood beat quicker, in parts, and 
in parts lamentably cools it. We find "A 
Toccata of Galuppi's," which gives us a 
laugh or two as excellent Italian comed3^ 
And lastly we find " Fra Lippo Lippi," 
winsome, sw^eet, and a poem which Tenny- 
son might have told to us in verse as en- 
chanting as that in which he has embalmed 
" Tithonus." 

It has been the writer's deliberate purpose 
to deal first Vv^ith " Men and Women," for 
this book, in its entirety, faults and virtues 
both included, will most probably mark the 
uncrumbling corner-stone of Mr. Brown- 
ing's future fame. Before this he had writ- 
ten a very sane and splendid poem called 
" How they Brought the Good News from 
Ghent to Aix." It is so fine a piece of 
work, indeed, that I can easily imagine his 
worshippers despising it. It is no nut to 
crack ; it shows what an artist its parent 



12 TJic Broicning Craze. 



might have been. Published originally in 
the same volume, if I mistake not, was 
''My Last Duchess," a brief enough thing, 
which has attained an extraordinary repu- 
tation for no apparent cause. It has the 
chute de phrase of a cruel man speaking 
heartlessly about a wife whom his neglect 
killed. But, except for the mild shudder 
it awakens, it is in no sense noteworthy, 
and the verse drags and hobbles with so 
much sluggishness that no one save the 
** professional reader" (a great friend of 
Mr. Browning's, because elocution helps 
the latter's frequent disjointed and staccato 
technics) can ever succeed in rendering it 
rightly. Among the earlier *' Dramatic 
Lyrics" must be remembered "The Pied 
Piper of Hamelin," one of the few English 
poems that have achieved a deserving pop- 
ularity among the masses. It is a child's 
poem, and therefore its occasional bizarre 
falsetto may be pardoned. Not so "The 
Flight of the Duchess," however, in which 
a charming and most spiritual tale is told 
somewhat after the style of an Ingoldsby 
Legend or Bab Ballad. It is filled with 
such rhymes as *' tintacks" and "syntax," 
"stir-up" and "syrup," " news of her," and 
" Lucifer," and many others equally ua- 



J 



The Broiv fling Craze. 1 1 3 

suited to a history at once so serious and 
so exalted. Here we are confronted with 
tliat deliberated oddity which might be 
termed Mr. Browning's most irritating 
fault, as it certainly is his least honest one. 
We see that he has planned all these fire- 
cracker surprises of diction ; they bear 
slight resemblance to that " rough power" 
by which his artistic laziness has so often 
been misnamed. For there is a certain 
class of critics (and, I regret to add, a large 
one) who only need the evidence of an 
author's bad rhymes, haphazard rhythms 
and defective constructions in order to dis- 
cover that he fairly bristles with " rough 
power." Le mot juste, the polished and ac- 
curate utterance, is in severe disrepute 
w^ith these persons. It has been they who 
for years have flung their jibes at the 
unrivalled perfection of Lord Tennyson's 
verse. Apparently, as they love to put it, 
the latter had not power because it was 
not *' rough." He was mincing because 
he never slurred a line ; he lacked the 
higher kind of emotion because he had 
patiently chiselled his work into a dignity 
above the frenzies of Byron or the hysteria 
of Shelley. I sometimes wonder, for my 
own part, if those cavillers who ring such 



114 The Browning Craze. 

wearisome changes on this one theme have 
ever considered how much great power is 
often at the root of poetical grace. Even 
if Tennyson were only felicitous (and he is 
that besides being a very noble poet as 
well) he would have accomplished much. 
All the remarkable poets who ever lived 
have had as much grace as grandeur. 
Grace is frequently inseparable from grand- 
cur, but when it is not it is never weak- 
ness ; it is always strength. The elastic 
step and flexible form of some delicate 
maiden may typify an endurance and forti- 
tude not possessed by the sturdiest athlete. 
Just as there were thousands of people 
who would have lost all regard for Carlylc 
if he had been dowered with a decorous 
and not an uncouth English idiom, so tlicre 
are thousands to-day who would consider 
Mr. Browning's poetry very tame indeed 
were it not studded with such points of 
ugliness and idiosyncrasy as those which 
disfigure "The Flight of the Duchess." 
But other poems that belong to Mr. Brown- 
ing's earlier manner, that were published 
among the two or three collections v/ith 
which, years ago, he first presented the 
world, and that deserve deep if not un- 
qualified commendation, are "Soliloquy in 



The Broivnifig Crarjc. 1 1 5 

a Spanish Cloister," "The Confessional," 
and "Holy-Cross Day." All these are 
alive with vigor, and not always by any 
means impossible to understand after a 
second or third reading — which is saying a 
good deal against them, perhaps, in the ^ 
opinion of the confirmed Browningite. 
"Holy-Cross Day" is an especially original 
and striking presentation of the Jew's de- 
graded condition during the Middle Ages. 
Nothing can be more trenchant than its 
incidental sarcasms, nothing more acute 
than the reproaches it hurls against the 
bigotries and hypocrisies of its time. 

All these better and wiser poems of Mr. 
Browning appeared many years ago. "Sor- 
dello" had, unless I err, preceded them, 
and from the absurd enigma of that book 
their comparative clearness was a welcome 
change. Mr. Browning began to be hailed 
as a poet emergent from darkness, and in 
a few quarters bright hopes were enter- 
tained of his future. ''Sordello," when 
heeded at all, may have made the cynics jest 
and the thoughtful look grieved, but we 
have no record that it had more materially 
injured the young versifier who had chosen 
to masquerade in it en sphinx. Everybody 
knows the story of how Barry Cornwall's 



Ii6 The Broiv)ii!ig Craze. 

Vvife gave him the book during his con- 
valescence after a great illness, and of how 
he read the first page bewilderedly, then 
amazedly, and at length in nervous terror. 
Handing it a little later to his wife, he 
asked the tremulous question, ''What do 
you make of this ?" And when, some fif- 
teen or twenty minutes afterwards, Mrs. 
Proctor replied, "I don't understand a 
word of it," licr husband burst forth in 
delight, " Thank God I am 7totmadf' This 
tale may or may not be false, but it cer- 
tainly bears the stamp of probability. I re- 
call, in about my eighteenth year, discred- 
iting the statements I had heard relative to 
"Sordello's" unintelligibility, and attempt- 
ing to read the book with a confidence in 
my own anti-Philistine comprehension of 
j-t. But a few pages convinced me that 
report had not falsified its odious " tougli- 
ness." Beautiful gleams occur in it, but 
\ they are like flying lights over a surface of 
^ heavy darkness. Now and then, for twenty 
lines or so, you feel as if you had smoothly 
mastered its meaning ; again, all is dis- j 
array and density. It is like seeing a fine V 
statue reflected in a cracked mirror : here 
is the curve of a symmetric arm, but you 
follow it only to meet an abortive bulge of 



TJie Broivning Craze. 1 17 

elbow ; there is the outline of a sculptur- 
esque cheek, but you trace below it a re- 
pellent deformity of throat ; once more 
you light with joy upon a thigh of fault- 
less moulding, but lower down you are 
shocked by obese distortion. The whole 
'*poem" resembles a caricature of some 
Gothic cathedral, in planning which some 
demented architect has treated his own 
madness to a riot of gargoyles. The en- 
semble is monstrous, inexcuscible. But, like 
many of Mr. Browning's later modern 
poems, it strikes you as more of a wilful 
failure than a feeble one. 

All the plays of this author were pub- 
lished by him while he was still a young 
man. He calls himself, in one of his lyrics, 
"Robert Browning, you writer of plays," 
and it is evident, from the dramatic spirit 
informing a great deal of his verse, that he 
believed himself with extreme seriousness 
to be a dramatist of high rank. Eulogy 
untold has been poured upon him in this 
capacity. Long before the " Browning 
Craze" had developed its first febrile symp- 
toms, no less an authority than Dickens 
was reported to have exclaimed, in a burst 
of enthusiastic reverence, that he would 
rather have written "A Blot in the 'Scut- 



1 18 TJie BrozuntHsr Craze 



cheon" than all tlie novels to which his 
name was signed ! It seems impossible 
that the creator of "David Copperfield " 
could ever have made any such wantonly 
random declaration. And yet, not very 
long ago, an English writer of some distinc- 
tion endeavored to prove that " Strafford," 
" Colombe's Birthday," and "The Return 
of the Druses" had been successfully per- 
formed before London audiences. They 
may have been performed, but that they 
were in any degree successful cannot for 
an instant be credited. They are not 
dramas at all ; they are no more than dia- 
logues divided arbitrarily into acts. And 
yet they have been compared to the plays 
of Shakespeare by several inflammable 
zealots in the Browning cause. Still, after 
all, writers have existed who rejoiced, dur- 
ing the past two hundred years, in heaping 
odium upon Shakespeare as a charlatan, 
and we all recollect the contempt with which 
Sir Samuel Pepys wrote of him, not to men- 
tion Oliver Goldsmith's freely-expressed 
disdain in the " Vicar of Wakefield." Thus 
it becomes apparent that humian taste has 
many foibles and vagaries, and that the 
blare of a few partisan trumpets cannot do 
much for the establishment of a genuine 



TJie Brozvniug Craze. 119 

literary fame. As for that mightily be- 
lauded play, "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon," 
it was accorded an admirable oral chance 
at the Star Theatre in New York, two or 
three years ago. Mr. Lawrence Barrett 
took the part of Tresham, and all the other 
characters, as the newspapers put it, were 
"in good hands." Mr. Barrett and all his 
company did their best for the play. At 
the end of the third act I heard somebod}^ 
near me murmur that it was " Oh, im- 
mensely fine, don't yoM know, but a closet- 
play . . . yes, decidedly a closet-p lay." I 
could not help asking myself whether the 
reputation which it had through years en- 
joyed were not a sort of closet-reputation 
as well. For my own part, I had heard it 
somewhat apathetically and mechanically 
called "marvellous" and "grand" a great 
many times, before I attempted to read it, 
by people v^^ho used these epithets as though 
they were somehow pledged to propriety 
for their correct delivery. But I realize 
now that it is a work of talented adroitness 
and little more. There is something curi- 
ously professorial and factitious about it, 
brought forth more clearly by the foot- 
lights than by perusal, and yet perceptible 
through either medium. Its " psj'chology" 



120 The Broivuiyig Craze. 

becomes overburdening, oppressive. Every- 
body, from the first scene till the last, is on 
transcendental stilts ; nor is such impres- 
sion diminished by the blunt, choppy char- 
acter of Mr. Browning's blank verse. As 
Tresham is made to fling this forth in sen- 
tence after sentence, his character grows 
more and more unsympathetic. He is 
meant to be the ideal of honor and nobility, 
and he gradually becomes to us, during the 
progress of the piece, more and more of a 
petulant metaphysician. He says to the 
seducer of his sister, on finding him at the 
casement of this lady, about to enter it 
surreptitiously at night,- 

" We should join hands in frantic sympathy 
If you once taught me the unteachable, 
Explained how you can live so, and so lie. 
With God's help I retain, despite my sense, 
The old belief — a life like yours is still 
Impossible. Now draw." 

Could the far-fetched be carried much 
further than to make a bluff English cav- 
alier talk (and especially under these con- 
ditions of anguish and preoccupation) in a 
strain of such hair-splitting highfalutinism ? 
As for the killing of Mertoun by Tresham, 
it becomes, considering his approaching 
marriage to Mildred, almost ridiculous as 



The Brozvninsr Craze. 1 2 1 



•;i> 



a tragic expedient. We cannot but feel 
how much safer than di fe7nfne coiirei'te that 
sister, married to her imprudent boyish 
lover, would have remained for the rest of 
her life. And regarding the way in which 
Mildred not merely forgives but blesses the 
slayer of him whom she worshipped, I will 
venture to affirm that there was not a single 
auditor in the Star Theatre on the night of 
the performance to which I have alluded, 
who did not feel that here a note of the 
very falsest exaggeration had been struck. 
But the '* Browning Craze" was in full fury 
at that time, and perhaps not a few qualms 
of natural dislike were loyally repressed. 
Of the many incontestable merits that be- 
long to "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon" I will 
not speak : for a quarter of a century the 
world has had these dinned into its ears, 
and alike the friends and foes of Mr. 
Browning should by this time be well ac- 
quainted with them. They are not, in my 
own judgment, at all equal to the praise 
with which they have been so lavishly 
greeted. The play is at best three acts of 
inexorable grimness, lit by not one ray of 
humor. To have compared it Vvdth any of 
Shakespeare's masterpieces was by no 
means a friendly office to perform toward 



122 The Brozvnins^ Craze 



it, since time is apt to avenge such mistakes 
rather harshly. Perhaps the retribution 
may be quite tardy in coming : it usually 
is. La vengeance est im plat qui se mange 
froid. But in the end it is apt to come. 
No amount of thrifty bushes may reconcile 
the daintier palate to inferior wine, though 
when it is good it may need no bush at all. 

*' Pippa Passes" deserves mention as the 
most charming of its writer's plays ; but, 
with the exception of "Paracelsus" (a very 
voluminous affair, full of untold tedium), 
it is perhaps the least " actable" of them 
all. It is, however, a most delightful pro- 
duction, and the only member of its group, 
I should say, which has not been rated far 
above its deserts. The others attempt to 
be plays and are not ; they drag ; they are 
over-subtle ; they lack freshness or attract- 
iveness of story. But *' Pippa Passes," an 
airy, graceful, and yet deeply significant 
composition, succeeds, somehow, in being 
a play without the slightest apparent effort. 
That it will not act is nothing derogatory 
to it, for the same view could sensibly be 
held of " The Tempest." 

With these more youthful achievements 
it might be said that the fame of Mr. 
Browning passed through its primary 



TJic Broz^niing Craze. 123 

phase. His name, between twenty and 
thirty years ago, was rarely spoken witliout 
an accent of mingled admiration and amuse- 
ment. Few except silly adulators failed 
to admit his grave and glaring faults ; few 
except those whom, such faults drove back 
from an acquaintance with him, failed to 
perceive that he was dowered with extra- 
ordinary natural gifts. By such a poem 
as *' In a Gondola" he had won his right 
to the highest future recognition, '' In 
a Gondola " was marred by follies of 
conception and execution, but it seemed 
to-foretell a great deal, and it was a dra- 
matic lyric that now and then pierced and 
enraptured its reader. Much of it was 
superb, and other portions were almost 
puerile in their fantastic heedlessness of 
performance. There was, up to this point, 
no doubt that Mr. Browning could sing 
with a new voice, but at the same time a 
voice clogged by discordant notes. Would 
he ever rid himself of those notes through 
a careful study of what art really meant ? 
Would he cast aside all his semi-barbarous 
peculiarities and rise divested of their en- 
cumbering mannerisms? 

" The Ring and the Book " proved other- 
wise. Mr. Browninsf, with an immense 



124 T^h£ Broivning Craze. 

challenge, flung scorn in the face of those 
who had hoped the brightest things for 
his poetic future. 

At the time "The Ring and the Book" 
appeared, Tennyson had set the spire upon 
his cathedral of majestic song. He had 
written *Maud," and its novelty of melody 
had enchanted thousands; he had written 
" The Princess," and its prismatic yet potent 
verses were known and loved countless 
miles past the rainy little isle in which he 
had conceived them ; he had made " In 
Memoriam " break like a sea upon a thou- 
sand shores of thought, throb amid count- 
less caves of speculation and yearning, sob 
amid unnumbered reaches of passion and 
regret. Tennyson's fame had already based 
itself upon undying pediments. Mr. Brown- 
ing was expected by a few earnest adher- 
ents to surpass the Laureate. Another 
effort came from him, and as '' The Ring 
and the Book " this effort was promptly 
obse'de with flattering bravos. 

But what, after all, was it, this " Ring 
and the Book "? I recall spending a whole 
summer in trying to make myself believe 
that it was a great poem. I was then about 
three-and-tvventy years old, and many re- 
views had counselled me into crediting that 



The Browning Craze. 125 

it was something worthy to be put side-and- 
side with Milton, Dante and Heaven knows 
whom else in the way of epic splendor. I 
am tempted to write now with the boyish 
animus that filled me then, but in doing so 
I must first record that I respected the re- 
viewers very fervently and wanted to prove 
I was their mate in funds of devout appre- 
ciation. And hov/ I did struggle to bring 
about tliis result ! How I beat back the 
promptings of rvrj better judgment ! How I 
insisted upon assuring myself that such 
and such a line v/as not brutally obscure ! 
How I strove to convince muvself that the 
telling of the same story over and over 
again, even though different mouths thus 
told it, was not a travesty upon analytic 
poignancy ! I was in that servile mood 
toward the newspaper critics then, which 
may in a measure account for my persist- 
ent distrust during later years. . . . And at 
last my good angel informed me, toward 
autumn, that I had wasted my sum.mer, 
that langua ge was never given us to con- 
ceal our thought, and that every artist must 
either ~'see"^~To~strengthen his expression 
through the clarification of it or be content 
to have oblivion punish him for such neg- 
lect. 



126 Tlic Brozi'iiing Crar.c. 

*' The Ring and the Book " was le com- 
mencement de la fin with Mr. Browning. It 
must have made him somewhat like the 
hero in his own praiseworthy poem, "A 
Lost Leader," and cost him many rational 
devotees. But it gained him others. His 
final poetic step had been taken. He was 
going to yield himself to freaks and whims; 
he intended to despise the artist and culti- 
vate \\\^ poseur. 

He has cultivated the poseur, nearly al- 
ways, ever since. 

I do not deny the hrillianc y of his misi a-k£ 
in writing "The Ring and the Book." To 
refuse force to that work would be like re- 
fusing force to a cyclone. But a cyclone is 
not a poem. Perhaps nothing so daringly 
prolix has ever been perpetrated in the 
whole range of English literature. Hidden 
away amid the quartz-like Browningese of 
text lies many a diamond of thought and 
song. But reading and mining are two 
different occupations. One cannot v/ell 
conceive of " The Ring and the Book" dy- 
ing. Death will ^R4tt probably not be its 
fate, but a protracted oblivion will find it 
instead. Fashion makes people read it and 
talk about it now, but fashi on is often an- 
other name for forgetfulness. Human pa- 



The Broivning Craze. 127 

tience will not endure its endless repetitions 
of the same theme, its terribly tiresome 
presentations of one bloody and unsavory 
tale at different angles of vision. You can 
scarcely see in the whole massive bulk and 
plan of this metrical monstrosity any trace 
of the humor which Mr. Browning has oc- 
casionally shown elsewhere ; a keener hu- 
morous sense would, I think, have saved him 
from the attempt to saddle poor posterity 
with so cumbrous a burden. Nor is Mr. 
Browning's blank verse, even when most 
clear of meaning, an agreeable species of 
invention. It is original enough ; its ear- 
marks are not to be confounded with those 
of any other poet ; but when least marred 
by parentheses, inversions, involutions, 
guos egos and ellipses, it is almost never 
free from a particular trick or conceit, 
Vv-hich grows, after incessant recurrence, as 
much a monotony as an aggravation. This 
consists in making one substantive stand 
for several verbs, each verb being at the 
root, so to speak, of a new and distinct sen- 
tence, but all sentences being huddled to- 
gether in a way that sometimes renders 
turbid the simplest thought. Let us try to 
find an instance or two of this painful pe- 



i2o The Browning Craze, 

culiarity. Take the following, for exam- 
ple, from " The Ring and the Book :" 

"The Canon Caponsacchi, then, was sent 
To change his garb, retrim his tonsure, tie 
The clerkly silk round everj^ plait correct, 
Make the impressive entry on his place 
Of relegation. , ." 

Or this, from a like source : 

" What if he gained thus much, 
Wrung out this sweet drop from the bitter Past, 
Bore off this rose-bud from the prickly brake 
To justify such torn clothes and scratched hands, 
And, after all, brought something back from Rome ?" 

But the illustrations of this most infelic- 
itous tendency could be made to cover 
pages. And we are now accepting Mr. 
Browning's blank verse at its best, not at 
its worst. Its worst is sometimes posi- 
tively horrifying. Surely the man should 
have a very wondrous message for human- 
ity who aims to deliver this message as a 
poet and yet continually scorns to do so as 
an artist. But, after all, who of us has a 
hard enough conscience to grant that the 
artist and the poet are ever separable ? 
Whatever his mentality, his reach of spirit- 
ual vision, his command of pungent and 
illuminative epithet, how shall a vrriter 



The Broivning Craze, 129 

presume to disdain form in searching after 
the expression of truth ? Quand on se bat 
on ne cJioisit pas ses amies may reasonably 
explain the method of some hot contestant 
against a political or social wrong. But 
when the poet fights what he believes to 
be worst error, are we not justified in ex- 
pecting from him a well-burnished blade 
and a wrist whose turns reveal both dex- 
terity and harmonious movement ? To the 
merest beginner in verse-making it is com- 
monly understood that clashes of conso- 
nants are the sorriest destruction of melody. 
He must avoid them if he wishes to write 
presentable or reputable iambs. And yet 
Mr. Browning outrages taste in the follov/- 
ing lines, taken at random from his works, 
where remain innumerable other specimens, 
just as dissonant, strident, and sibilant : 

It strikes a Fourth, a Fifth thrusts in its nose . . . 
Two must discept . . . has distinguished . . . 
God'sgold just shining its last where that lodges . , . 
Billets that blaze substantial and slow . . . 
The Knights who to the Dark Tower's search 

addressed . . . 
Fear which stings ease . . . 
"You are sick, that's sure," they say . . . 
Who breasted, beat Barbarians, stemmed Persia 

rolling on . . . 
To a city bears a fall'n host's woes . . . 



1 30 The Broiujiiug Craze. 

Wagner, Dvorak, Liszt ... to where . . . trumpets, 

shawms . . . 
Adjudges such . . . how canst thou . . . this wise 

bound . . . 

And finally, from " Ferishtah's Fancies:" 
When my lips just touched your cheek . . . 

The italics here are my own ; for although 
the consonantal gruff ness in this last quoted 
line is not so striking as that of many 
which have preceded it, the contrast be- 
tween its tender sentiment and its coarsely 
unmelodic versification affects one like a 
vulgar slap in the face. Multitudes of 
other similar lines exist throughout Mr. 
Browning's copious work. And I cannot 
see how any vigor of idea can excuse such 
feebleness of presentation. Surely nature 
and life, which are so akin to art, do not 
demand of us an indulgence for such un- 
happy imperfection. Because a gnarled 
and blasted tree bears a few sprays of fresh 
and glossy leaves we do not gaze upon it 
to the neglect of healthful surrounding 
growths. Because we know that a child 
or a woman possesses mental charms we 
do not tolerate a waspish acerbity of phrase 
in either. But from art we exact the near- 
est approach to perfection, not the most 



The BrouJiiiiio- Craze, 



zigzag deviation from it. Poetic fame has 
no pathway to its temple like that traditional 
one to a forlorner goal ; it is not paved with 
good intentions ; we insist, indeed, upon 
its being quarried from the very marbles 
of Pentelicus. 

Mr. Browning's published writing since 
"The Ring and the Book " need not be 
dwelt upon in this essay. Those loyal mani- 
acs to the " Browning Craze " have their own 
Bedlamite reasons, no doubt, for admiring 
"Red Cotton Night-Cap Country" and 
"The Inn Album." And, after all, what 
(in America, at least) does the " Browning 
Craze " signify ? The spirit of American 
culture has always been an imitative one, 
and not seldom to a snobbish degree. It 
was quite in the order of things that the 
" Browning Craze " should rise in London, 
flow a westerly course, and empty into 
Chicago. But it submerged Boston on its 
way — or at least partially so. I have no 
doubt that in both cities the societies which 
have been its offspring possess many intel- 
ligent and sincere members. But it is very 
improbable that all these members are 
either intelligent or sincere. One might 
confidently assert that a great many of 
them arc clouded by dulness and tinctured 



132 TJic Br ozindng Craze. 

with toadyism. It does not require much 
brains for anybody to perceive that the as- 
sumption of a certain taste will produce 
the appearance of exclusiveness on the part 
of such an assumer. The jargon of the 
■art-schools, for example, is easily caught, 
and at almost any exhibition of foreign 
paintings you will discover that some pic- 
ture which the general public would turn 
from as unpardonably quaint, rococo, or 
audacious will attract a little coterie of 
fervid adorers. Perhaps a few of these 
may honestly believe that the painter in 
question is a towering genius ; but the ma- 
jority are yearning to anoint his locks with 
spikenard and myrrh solely because he is 
considered "caviare to the general," above 
the vulgar herd et id genus omne. It is 
doubtful whether the Browning societies of 
England have gained as many recruits from 
any other cliques or associations as from 
those whom Mr. Gilbert has so mercilessly 
satirized as the Esthetes. But to be an 
aesthete is by no means to be a fool. These 
persons laugh among each other at the 
caricatures into which they turn themselves, 
very much as we may believe that any two 
augurs did of old. Possibly the Brov/n- 
ingites laugh now and then among each 



TJie Bi'ozvning Craze. 133 

other at the solemn importance with which 
they are supposed to inform the digging } 
out of a poor tortured thought from be- 1 
neath crushing layers of words. And when i 
they reflect at all seriously upon their 
undertakings and their achievements, the 
result certainly cannot be very edifying. 
To become a Browningite is indeed not 
to have distinguished one's self for much 
sense, either common or uncommon. Hero- 
worship is always an unwholesome occupa- 
tion, even if the hero shine with a truly 
glorious light. Yet in the case of Mr. 
Browning there is no glorious light at all, 
but one put under a bushel, and put there 
with not a little of the same insufferable 
vanity that made Diogenes take up his 
abode in a tub. There are very few broad- 
minded and unaffected people who have 
read Mr. Browning's poetry, or the worthier 
portion of it, who would not be w^illing 
unhesitatingly to tell us that he might have 
grown a poet of v/ide and persistent fame. 
But he has chosen so to mantle himself in 
the most rash and headlong moods of ob- 
scurity, he has so trivialized, cheapened and 
frittered av/ay the talents which might 
have made him serve efficiently the mag- 
nificent art he professes to revere, that his 



1 34 The Browning Craze. 

laurels will turn dry and brittle long before 
another century has dealt with his present 
renown. Meanwhile he has a kind of adu- 
lation to-day, but one with which no true 
artist should be content. Indeed, the 
author of " Fifine at the Fair " and " Pac- 
chiarotto " is no longer an artist, though 
he who wrote '^ Pippa Passes" and "Love 
among the Ruins" may once have closely 
approximated to such a distinction. He 
may not be aware of the biting and dis- 
creditable fact, but hundreds of those who 
now " study " and " cultivate " him are 
beings of the kind who would rave hysteri- 
cally over some headless and armless torso, 
if thoroughly sure that the leve vuigus 
would not presume to join in their pedantic 
chorus, after so forlorn a fragment of 
sculpture had been excavated and set up 
for popular inspection. 

That Mr. Browning is a poet representa- 
tive of the age in which he now so eminently 
flourishes cannot with any fairness be con- 
ceded. His work makes one point plain, 
though it leaves so many others in darkness. 
The impetus of rationalistic thought seems 
hardly to have touched him. He is an 
orthodox believer of the most acquiescent 
type, as his '* Christmas Eve and Easter 



The Browning Craze. 135 

Day " would conclusively reveal, apart from 
hundreds of other evidences throughout 
the vast volume of his work. The sinewy 
scientific push of his time has left him 
conservatively unaffected. He regards the 
priceless teachings of such men as Herbert 
Spencer, Buckle, Tyndall, Huxley and 
Lecky with as much unconcern as if he 
were a clergyman sanctified by the most 
rigid Church-of-Engkmd orders. No qualm 
of doubt regarding the Thirty-Nine Articles 
appears ever to disturb him. He is just as 
pious as he is frequently opaque. He refers 
to God with that familiarity of personal 
acquaintanceship which might distinguish 
our own Dr. Talmage. He is perfectly 
sure and satisfied on the question not only 
of an anthropomorphic deity but on that of 
a future immortality, accountability, par- 
don and punishment. A good deal of 
his vagueness is like that of the current 
theological treatise ; to the consistent and 
logical agnostic of our time it means nearly 
the same thing. Those who want their 
modern poets to be men permeated by the 
so-called materialism of the century will 
not find a poet after their ovrn heart in a 
singer to w^hom the divinity of Christ is 
romantically indisputable. For som.e minds 



136 The Br(>7i<nin^ Grace. 

it will seem difficult to accept this kind of 
poet as great, at an epoch when English 
philosophy has drawn so sharp a limit be- 
fore the abyss of the unknowable. Mr. 
Browning might be inclined to shift the 
entire burden of ecclesiastic responsibility 
off his shoulders by declaring that he does 
not speak for himself but for his countless 
dramatic characters ; and yet he speaks 
through no lips except his own when he 
says, with hardy dogmatism : 

God's work, be sure, 
No more spreads wasted than fails scant i 
He filled, did no^ exceed, man's want v 
Of beauty in thi.> life. 

And again : 

So hapt 

My chance. He stood there. Like the smoke 

Pillared o'er Sodom \vhen day broke, — 

I saw Him. One magnific pall 

Mantled in massive fold and fall 

His dread, and coiled in snaky swathes 

About his feet : night's black, tliat bathes 

All else, broke, grizzled with despair, 

Against the soul of blackness there. 

A gesture told the mood within — 

That wrapped right hand which based the chin, 

That intense meditation fixed 

On his procedure, — pity mixed 



TJie Brozvuiiig Craze. 137 

With the fulfilment of decree. 
Motionless, thus, he spoke to me, 
Who fell before his feet, a mass, 
No man now. 

Bugabooism could not go much further 
than this. There is something Calvinistic 
in these words, emanent soon afterward 
from the mouth of a palpable and tangible 
deity : 

In the roll 
Of judgment which convinced mankind 
Of sin, stood many, bold and blind, 
Terror must burn the truth into. . . . 

These and like passages indicate unmis- 
takably that Mr. Browning accepts Chris- 
tianity in not a few of its most conventional 
forms. This may be all well enough ; it is 
quite the gentleman's own business if he 
goes regularly to church every Sunday and 
hears a sermon less involved as to meaning 
than one of his own poems and at times 
considerably more grammatical. But it 
would be idle to claim that he who exhibits 
this theologic passivity, this religious com- 
plaisance, can be said to rank at all abreast 
of his period as a strenuous and catholic 
thinker. It is true that the most amaz- 
ing doctrines exist with regard to the 
right province of poetry and tlie fitting 



138 TJic Broivjiing Craze. 

equipments of poets, and a multitude of 
critics, otherwise quite credible, will tell 
you that it is not half so necessary for the 
poet to think as to feel. But thinking and 
feeling, as modern science explains, are 
pretty nearly one and the same thing. 
Wordsworthian " inspiration " is not es- 
teemed so highly as it was forty years ago. 
The canons and requisitions of art, 
however, remain unaltered. Emotion is 
still a splendidly reputable factor in all 
poetry when governed by that self-control 
which is the secret equally of Shakespeare's 
best verse as it is of Longfellow's or Lord 
Tennyson's. License of expression has 
been so often and imprudently praised in 
poets that an unfortunate abuse of latitude 
has become far too manifest among En- 
glish-speaking circles of them. Who has 
not heard the contemptuous declaration 
that " there is more truth than poetry " in 
such and such a statement ? If scientific 
investigation is the reigning intellectual 
stimulus of our nineteenth century, that is 
very far from being a cause why poetry 
should perish. For poetry, we now per- 
ceive, is not to be defined as Milton (a 
great poet) defined it, or as ^ Poe (a ve ry 
poor one) also defined it. Poetry is life, as 



The Browning Craze. 139 

all literature is life. But it is life in this 
different way from the rest of literature, 
that over it is flung the influence of beauty, 
a nd so the^p hases of human experience are 
made in tum'subrimely, tenderly, or ^a^^ 
t fi^etically rioteworthy. This influence is 
like a transfiguring light ; it is presentment, 
treatment, in a certain lim.ited meaning, 
enchantment. The subject itself may be 
more or less susceptible of elevation. By- 
ron had merely to let this light play over 
such a subject as Venice, Lake Leman, 
Petrarch's tomb, the stars of heaven, or a 
storm in the Jura Alps, and enthralling po- 
etic pictures glowed with vividness before 
the mind. But Burns, as his admirers as- 
sert, made a mouse immortal by precisely 
the same means. Often you hear it affirmed 
that this or that subject cannot be dealt 
with by poetry, that it is too mean, too 
inferior, too recondite, too coarse, too 
prosaic. In these cases the transfiguring 
light has been more difficult to throw, or 
perhaps the imaginative flame and lenses 
whence it has taken origin have been ill-fed 
and ill-managed. The more un-ideal the 
subject the harder to idealiz e it, to turn it 
into poet ry^. And yet we have seen Shakes- 
peare in his creation of '^Caliban," JNIilton 



I40 The Browning Craze. 

in his " Satan," Coleridge in his '' Ancient 
Mariner," and Lord Tennyson in his "Vis- 
ion of Sin," envelop the uncanny and repul- 
sive with a raiment as of magical tissue. 
Students of French poetry will remember 
" La Chaj'ogne " of Baudelaire, a poem which 
has always struck me with the same effect 
as if it were a moonlit dung-heap. I do 
not applaud, or even suggest an approval of, 
such poetry. But if the dung-heap is there, 
so, somehov;, is the moonlight ; and who 
that has read this thrilling poem can for- 
get the melody and eloquence of its last 
stanza ? — 

Alors, Jiia beaule, dites a la v^rllline 

Qtri te niaugera de br.isers. 
Que je garde la forme et resseticc divine 

De Hits amours dccoiuposcs ! 

The English have, as Mr. Browning's 
own famous wife said of them, in her 
" Aurora Leigh," 

A scornful insular way 
Of calling the French light. 

But, notwithstanding this alleged Gallic 
lightness, I do not believe it would be pos- 
sible for a ''Sordello," an "Inn Album," a 
"Red Cotton Night-Cap Country," or 
even a "Ring and the Book," to have ap- 



The Browning Craze. 141 

pcared in French without promptly being 
crushed by the heaviest judicial censure. 
And what rigid, healthy, uncompromising 
lessons would Mr. Browning have been 
taught if he had been born a Frenchman ! 
Not that he could not have learned excel- 
lent lessons while still remaining- an Eng- 
lishman. But as a writer of French verse 
his crimes against style Vv^ould have suf- 
fered condign and relentless punishment. 
The French w^ould either have long ago 
made it impossible for him to attain the 
least celebrity, writing as he has written, 
or they would have trained and taught 
him by the simple yet forcible formula, 
that no great poet can ever achieve great- 
ness through the wilful wrapping up of his 
meaning. And this is the sin which Mr. 
Browning has repeatedly, unrepentingly 
committed. The "craze" which he lias 
succeeded in rousing is one of those inex- 
plicable drifts of literary fashion that 
mark, both here and in England, our 
strange passing century. But in England 
it is not their first similar mistake. They 
crowned and then discrowned poor Sidne}'' 
Dobell ; they raved over and then flouted 
Alexander Smith ; they lifted Gerald Mas- 
sey upon a lyric pedestal only to hurl him 



142 TJie Brozvning Craze. 

downward a little later. For us Ameri- 
cans to catch this curious fever is far less 
excusable, and a good deal of fatuous, 
cringing Anglomania is at the bottom of 
it. To-day we are devoutly imitating 
British perversity in our genuflection be- 
fore a very ordinary Russian novelist 
named Tolstoi, and both writing and 
speaking of that sketchy, padded, inter- 
minable tale, ''Anna Karenina," as if it 
v/ere really a classic masterpiece. But the 
gods, as everybody knows, are very angry at 
the idea of an International Copyright, and 
in their animosity they seem to have made 
the American reader their diligent abet- 
tor. Until the American reader pays less 
attention to the curiosities of transatlantic 
literature and more to the honest efforts 
enshrined within his own, we cannot hope 
for much chance of his even desiring that 
Congress shall do her work of reparation 
and atonement. He might not, after all, 
find it so very unpalatable to exchange his 
"Browning Craze" for an Emerson one. 
Emerson was a great deal more spiritual 
poet than is Mr. Browning, and yet quite 
as virile. He had the faculty, also, of con- 
veying his thoughts neither in spasms nor 
mysticisms. Moreover, he is a wonder- 



The Browning Craze. 143 

fully stimulating writer to other minds, 
and debates and discussions that took 
cither his prose or verse as their text 
might perhaps bring just as much profit as 
wading through pages that too often seem 
but a turbulent brawl and snarl of verbi- 
age. 

One of the most distressing features 
about Mr. Browning's existent reputation 
— distressing, I mean, to those who discern 
and measure its basis of humbug — is the 
way in which his admirers are never Lircd 
of saying that it wholly outshines the re- 
nown of Lord Tennyson, and that its pos- 
sessor has touched, thus far in our cen- 
tury, tiie high-tide mark of English poetry. 
So, until not very long since, fanatics cried 
that Carlyle, with his barbarisms, loomed 
above that most masterly and dignified 
of writers, Macaulay ; but now the brief 
prejudice of the hour has passed, and the 
morrows have begun to dole out equity, 
as they generally do, with no matter how 
tardy a service. 

Never was a greater literary injustice 
perpetrated than the placing of Mr. 
Browming above Lord Tennyson. The 
Laureate has indeed served his art with a 
profound and lovely fidelity, while it is no 



144 ^■^^^^'-' Broivnitig Craze. 

exaggeration to state of Mr. Browning 
that he has not seldom insulted his as 
though it were a pickpocket. " In a Gon- 
dola " may be a fine love-lyric ; but who 
would compare its halting ruggedness to 
the fairy music of "The Day-Dream?" 
Only the people who profess to like the 
Venus of Milo better without her lost 
arms than with them— the people to whom 
deficiency and inadequacy are held dearer 
than flawlessness and finish. A passion 
for Mr. Browning's work has frequently 
been one of the refuges of mediocrity. 
You are thrown, as it were, w^ith a mixed 
but rather patrician society of, let us say 
. . . invalids, in the same asylum. And it 
is such a mild, elegant sort of lunacy ! 
Nobody is very much in earnest, after all. 
They have learned, most of them, to look 
as if they thought " A Pillar at Sebzevat " 
luminiferous reading and "Jochanan Hak- 
kadosh" a model of perspicuity. If you 
say to them that Mr. Browning has never 
produced a poem half so grand as the 
"Ode on the Duke of Wellington," they 
appear to feel so sorry for you that you 
begin to feel sorry, yourself, for having 
drawn thus largely, if unintentionally, 
upon the funds of their compassion. And 



The Browning Craze. 145 

yet bid them to show you where, through- 
out all Mr. Browning's dramatic idyls, 
dramatic lyrics and dramatic everything 
else, there are poems that so burn with 
beauty as the monologues of " CEnone," of 
''Tithonus," of ^' The Miller's Daughter," 
of *' Maud," of "The Dream of Fair Wo- 
men," of " The Palace of Art," of " St. Sim- 
eon Stylites," of "The Gardener's Daugh- 
ter," of "Sir Galahad," and they will be 
apt to give you response as indefinite as if 
it had been taken from some of their great 
master's verse. For all these poems just 
mentioned are monologues ; all, in varying 
degrees, are essential!)^ dramatic. Tenny- 
son chose, until his later life, to ignore 
the writing of drama ; but if he had at- 
tempted, in the full flush of his masterly 
vigor, to produce a "Cup," a "Harold" or 
a " Queen Mary," there cannot be much 
real question as to whether he would or 
would not have eclipsed "Colombe's Birth- 
day " and " King Victor and King Charles." 
I can ill imagine how any actual artist 
v/ould not instantly make up his mind to 
retain "In Memorlam " and "The Prin- 
cess " (those two inestimable marvels) even 
if by doing so he were threatened with the 
loss of everything that Mr. Browning has 



146 The Browning Craze. 

ever done, from the murky glooms of 
" Sordello" down to the recent most indo- 
lently scribbled "Parleyings." And as for 
those four incomparable " Idyls of the 
King" — "Enid," "Elaine," Vivien" and 
"Guinevere" — where amid the bristling 
entanglements of such verse as that pub- 
lished by the author of " Prince Hohen- 
stiel-Schwangau " shall we reach either 
their peers or their semblances ? 

Scientific criticism, which is the only 
kind meriting both credence and respect, 
will one day, perhaps, demonstrate much 
of what I have here only postulated, with- 
out aspiring logically to prove. And when 
such an event occurs it should strike a tell- 
ing blow at the languor which enervates a 
large proportion of those readers who have 
permitted their tastes to play very fantas- 
tic tricks with them. There is no objec- 
tion to the hottest rebellion against purity 
and sanity of method among iconoclasts 
who would replace gentile order by dan- 
gerous misrule; it is only, when anarchy 
gets into the high places of literature and 
begins its assaults, mutilations and sub- 
versions there that the intemperate are 
led to exult and the judicious to deplore. 
Still, progress, that arrives at so many of 



TJic Bnnvning Craze. 147 

her destinations by circuitous paths, may- 
be trusted yet again to set the crooked 
straight. It deserves to be held as proba- 
ble that she is at the present date mysti- 
cally concerning herself with a future 
demolition of the '' Browning Craze ; " and 
that her action may be speedy is a likeli- 
hood which all consistent optimists ought 
to place well up on the list of their rosiest 
hopes. 



Ji/7^ a^Z^/-^ ^^^ 








H 



THE TRUTH ABOUT OUIDA. 



Readers of current literature may have 
recently observed that two writers of repu- 
tation, Miss Harriet W. Preston and Mr. 
Julian Hawthorne, have been expressing 
rather pronounced opinions regarding the 
works of Ouida. Mr. Hawthorne's judg- 
ment was brief, and I need only add that it 
was extremely severe — far more severe, 
indeed, than any critical statement which I 
ever remember to have seen expressed by 
that writer. Miss Preston's decision took 
a much ampler form, and occupied nearly 
twelve pages of the Atlantic Monthly. What- 
ever may have been Miss Preston's inten- 
tion, she certainly does not appeal to us as 
one whom the merits of Ouida have more 
than lukew^armly affected. And yet, at the 
beginning of her essay, she assumes the at- 
titude of an appreciator rather than a de- 
tractor, taking pains to declare that her 
inquiry regarding the true causes of Ouida's 
immense popularity shall be ^' primarily 

143 



The Truth abotit Onida, 149 

and chiefly a search for merits rather than ^ 
a citation of defects." With this excellent 
resolution fully formed, she at once pro- 
ceeds to draw comparisons between Ouida 
and such great writers as Scott, George 
Sand, and even Victor Hugo. This has an 
encouraging sound enough ; we have the 
sensation that a refreshingly new note is to 
be struck in the general tone of fierce 
vituperation by which Ouida has been so 
persistently assailed for tvv^enty years. The 
truth about Ouida would be a pleasant 
thing to hear; we have heard so much facile 
falsehood. But Miss Preston proceeds to 
invest her theme with a curiously languid 
and tepid atmosphere. She finally aston- 
ishes all the sincere admirers of Ouida — 
and their number is to-day, among intelli- 
gent people, thousands and thousands — by 
saying that her " imagination, vigorous 
though it be and prolific, seldom rises to 
really poetic heights." This is certainly 
depressing for any one who has taken de- 
light in such exceptional prose-poem.s as 
" Ariadne" and "Signa." Still, a proper 
avoidance of enthusiasm must always form 
part of the modern critic's equipment ; the 
fashion is to look at everything imperturb- 
ably, from the Sphinx to the Brooklyn 



I50 



The Trtti/i about Oiiida. 



Bridge ; we somehow only tolerate the ex- 
orbitant and the florid when it takes the 
shape of disgusted invective. For a long \ 
period Ouida has endured the latter (not 
always quite patiently, if some of her retali- 
atory newspaper letters are recalled), and I 
confess that we owe Miss Preston a debt of 
gratitude for breaking the ice at last. None 
the less, however, do we own to a feeling 
that the ice might have been assailed by a 
little heavier and more efficient cleaver. 
The Atlantic reviewer appears, indeed, to 
be a trifle afraid, not to say ashamed, of 
her own pioneership. Tradition would | 
seem to be furtively reminding her that she 
is heading a revolt against it. And there * 
certainly might well seem a kind of literary 
defiance in any defence of Ouida. She has 
stood so long as a pariah that to give her 
boldly a few credentials of respectabilty, as 
it were, might in a temperament by no 
means timid still require some courage. I 
would not even appear to suggest that Miss 
Preston has doubted her own assertions 
concerning this great romancist, whenever 
they have been of a favorable turn. But it 
has struck me that she has almost doubted 
the advisability of her own position as so 
distinct a non-conformist. One smiles to 



The Truth about Ouida. 1 5 1 

remember the ridiculous abuse poured upon 
Ouida in England ever since somewhere 
about the year 1863. She has probably 
afforded more opportunity for the callow- 
undergraduate satirist than any author of 
the present century. I do not maintain that 
she w^as at first the recipient of an unde- 
served ridicule. But afterward this ridi- 
cule, because of the radical change in her 
work, became pitiably tell-tale ; it revealed 
that aggravating conservatism in those who 
arraigned her which had its root in either 
a very unjust, hasty and perfunctory skim- 
ming of her later books, or an entire igno- 
rance of their contents. She undoubtedly 
began all wrong. There are some liberal 
and high-minded people with whom the 
follies and faults of such stories as " Gran- 
ville de Vigne" and " Idalia" have wrought 
so disastrously that all their future impres- 
sions have been colored by these uncon- 
querable associations. It seem.s to me that 
Mr. Hawthorne is one of these, and I am 
certain that the late Bayard Taylor was 
one. When "Ariadne" appeared, only a 
year or two before Taylor's lamentably ill- 
timed death, he wrote concerning that en- 
chanting tale in the New York Tribime with 
a sternness of condemnation most regret- 



152 The Truth about Ouida. 

table, as I thought, in so alert and vigorous 
an intellect. When I expressed to Taylor 
m}^ surprise that he should have seen noth- 
ing beautiful or poetic in "Ariadne," he 
frankty declared to me that he saw nothing 
commendable in any line that Ouida had 
written. But many of her lovely sketches 
had already appeared, and that exquisite 
idyl, " Bebee, or The Two Little Wooden 
Shoes," with its tearful tenderness and its 
fiery, gloomy, piercingy^//*^/^ of passion, had 
given proof of its author's wakening force 
and discipline. 

]Vliss_Pr£sJjQQ^_c h i e f errar^shouM-affirm, 
has been her somewhat careless^huddling 
together of all Ouida's works and passing 
criticism upon them eji (^/g£^^wUhout more 
/ than vague indication of the diff erent peri- 
I ods^lH which they were produced, or the 
I various stages of development which^^they 
exhibit. This talented lady, however she 
~Is~to be praised for taking Ouida seriously 
(and that is a fine thing to have done at all, 
when it meant the flinging down of a 
gauntlet before disparagement no less in- 
sensate than cruel), has still failed in taking 
Ouida half seriously enough. I read with 
astonisliment in the Atlantic review, for ex- 
ample, an extended notice of " Idalia/' 



The TriiiJi about Onida, 



5j 



while such vastly better work as " FoUe- 
Farine" or " In Maremma" was quietly ig- 
nored. Candidly, I hold that Miss Preston's 
entire consideration of Ouida has been as 
limited, unsatisfactory and insufficient as, 
when all circumstantial points are duly 
recognized, it has been kindly, generous, 
and honorable. 

I have already expressed it as my con- 
viction that Ouida began very badly. She 
indeed began as badly as any genius did 
whose early and subsequent accomplish- 
ments in English letters are now known to 
us and may be read side by side with hers. 
Byron certainly showed far less power at 
the commencement of his ccreer than she 
did at the commencement of hers ; and 
those who possess my own deep veneration 
for the grandeur of Tennyson's poetry at 
its highest heights may have read some of 
the deplorable stanzas, modelled on a sort 
of hideous German-English plan, vv'hich 
have thus far, I believe, escaped the savage 
exposures of even his most merciless Amer- 
ican publishers. I find myself involuntarily 
tracing a parallel between the young Ouida 
and the young poets who preceded her by 
a few decades more or less. But this tend- 
ency easily explains itself, since she is pre- 



1 54 TJie Truth about Ouida, 

eminently a poet, notwithstanding hergreat 
gifts for romantic narration. The rhythmic 
faculty has been denied her, and for this 
reason she probably has written so much 
of that '^ poetical prose" which the average 
Englishm.an has been taught to hold in 
such phlegmatic contempt. If '' Granville 
de Vigne" had appeared in rhymes as clever 
and as prolix as Owen Meredith's " Lucile," 
it would doubtless have won a place far 
above that bright, hybrid, pseudc-poetic 
popular favorite. But ^' Granville de Vigne" 
has won no place, nor has "Strathmore," 
nor has '' Idalia," nor has *' Puck," nor even 
"Chandos," pronounced as was the dawn- 
ing change it exhibited. These works all 
mean a palaeozoic age for Ouida : her ex- 
traordinary powers were yet struggling for 
worthier expression. They are valuable 
alike in their absurdities and their better 
revelations, though the latter shone fitful, 
indeterminate, and often distressingly tran- 
sient. The superabundance of '' color," the 
weight of adiective pil ed on adjective , the 
lavTsh^dlspTay of an erudition as volumin- 
ous as it was sometimes erratic, the mere- 
tricious defects of style, the collet moiitc' 
superfluity of rhetoric, the impossible and 
ludicrous descriptions of luxury — all this 



The Truth about Ouida, 1 5 5 

has become with many of us in a manner 
comically classic. Ouida's early heroes, 
with their fleet Arabian steeds, their lordly 
lineage, their fabulous wealth or sentiment- 
ally picturesque poverty, their fatal fascina- 
tions for women and their deadly muscular 
developments for men — Ouida's early 
heroes, I say, have grown as representative 
of the overwrought in fiction as those of 
Byron have grown representative of like in- 
discretion in poetry. Nor are these faults 
of her youth entirely outlived by Ouida. 
" Fine writing" is still occasionally her 
bane, though it becomes less and less so 
with each new book she now produces. Her 
vocabulary has always been as copious as 
the sunlight itself, and her style is at pres- 
ent a direct, flexible and notably elegant 
one. She has _be en accused of ^^ cramming ," 
a£d__oi_maldn^IaJJltk_Jc^ ser- 

v ice for m ugji. But only very illiterate 
people could believe such a masquerade 
possible with her. She is indisputably a 
woman of spacious and most diversified 
learning, though she has not always known 
either the art of modestly concealing this 
fact, or that of letting it speak spontane- 
ously and judiciously for itself. Still, 
pedantry is not seldom the attribute of a 



1 56 The Truth about Ov.ida. 

greatly cultivated mind. We have seen 
this in the case of George Eliot, whose ad- 
mirers will perhaps feel like mobbing me 
v^^hen they read that I think her genius in 
many ways inferior to that of Ouida. And 
yet I grant that to a very large extent she 
possesses what Ouida was for a long time 
almost totally without — taste, artistic pa- 
tience, and that surest of preservatives, a 
firm and chiselled style. 

"Under Two Flags" may be said to have 
recorded a turning-point in this unique 
writer's career. It was full of the same 
tinselled and lurid hyperboles which had 
made so many readers of the extraordinary 
series hold up horrified hands in the past. 
But itsgaudiness and opulence of language 
were suited to its Algerian locale^ and the 
drowsy palms and deep-blue African skies 
of which it spoke to us accorded with the 
tropic tendencies of its phrases. It dis- 
played a wondrous acquaintance, also, with 
military life in Algeria, and for this reason 
amazed certain observers of an altered 
mise en scene in a novelist whom they had 
believed only able to misrepresent the 
patrician circles of England. But '* Under 
Two Flags" amazed by its perusal from 
still another cause. It contained one of 



The TrutJi about Oiiida. 157 

the most thrillingly dramatic episodes ever 
introduced into any novel of the school to 
v/hich such episodes belong, namely, the 
wild desert journey of Cigarette, the vivan- 
diere, bearing a pardon for the condemned 
soldier whom she loves. Cigarette reaches 
the place of execution just in time to fling 
herself upon her lover's breast and save 
him from the bullets of his foes by dying 
under them. We are apt nowadays to look 
askance at such heroic incidents, and the 
Vv'ord "unnatural" easily rises to our lips 
as we do so. Perhaps it rises there too 
easily. Self-sacrifice of the supreme kind 
has gone out of fashion in modern story- 
telling, and by a tacit surrender we have 
given scenes like this, with all their warm- 
blooded kinships, to the domiain of the] 
theatre. That fiction will ever care to re-/ 
same her slighted prerogative, the thriving 
influence of Zola and his more moderate 
American imitators would lead us to believe 
improbable. Still, the caprices of popular 
demand lend themselves unvrillingly to 
prophecy. One fact, however, cannot plaus- 
ibly be contradicted: the theatre has not 
invested her gift at any very profitable rate 
of interest, nor justified her present mono- 
poly of all that is stirring in romanticism. 



158 The TnitJi about Oiiida. 

" Tricotrin,'' if I mistake not, was the 
first important successor of '^ Under Two 
Flags," and here Ouida gave us the note- 
worthy proof that she had turned her at- 
tention toward ideal and poetic models. I 
fear it must be chronicled that the chaff in 
'•' Tricotrin" predominates over the wheat. 
The whole s tory is not seldom on stilts, 
and we often lose palieiice with the hero 
as more of 2i poseur than of the demigod he 
is described. The entire donne'e is too high- 
strung for its nineteenth-century concomi- 
itance. We feel as if everybody should 
wear what the managers of theatres would 
c;ill "shape dresses." Ouida still tempts 
the parodist ; the machinery of her plot, so 
to speak, almost creaks with age, now and 
then ; her personages attitudinize and are 
often tiresomely verbose. Tricotrin does 
so much with the aid of red fire and 
a calcium that his glaringly melodramatic 
death becomes almost a relief in the end. 
And yet the book scintillates with brilliant 
things, and if it had been written with an 
equal power in French instead of English, 
might have passed for the work of Victor 
Hugo. There is a great deal about it that 
the passionate aiid democratic soul of the 
French poet would have cordially delighted 



The Truth about Oiiida. 159 

in. It belongs to the same quality of in- 
spiration that produced *' Notre Dame de 
Paris," ''L'Homme Qui Rit," and "Fan- 
tine." But there have always been English 
people who have laughed at Hugo's tales, 
and in much the same spirit Ouida's coun- 
trymen laughed at the itinerant, commu- 
nistic Tricotrin, with his superb beauty, his 
pastoral abstemiousness and purity, his al- 
truistic philanthropy, his forsworn birth- 
right of an English earl, his wide clientele oi 
grimy and outcast worshippers, and his as- 
tounding range of opportunity to appear 
just in the nick of time and succor the op- 
pressed. Far more daring license with the 
manipulation of fact, however, has been 
taken by the elder Dumas and others. 
Ouida's book came about thirty or forty 
years too late for sober critical acceptance 
in her own country, and it was of a kind 
that her own country has never perma- 
nently accepted. Still, it revealed her per- 
haps for the first time as an original power 
in letters. She had struck in it the one 
note which has always been most positively 
her own ; she had told the world that she 
\vasj> prn c;p.pr) Rf- r>f dnimtl ess imagination 
a nd sol i tary excd i^iuc^. As an idealist in 
prose fiction no English writer has thus far 



i6o The Truth about Onida. 

approached her. " Tricotrin" would not 
alone have made her what she is. It re- 
mained for her to improve upon this re- 
markable effort, and to fling up, like some 
tract of land under convulsive disturbance, 
peaks that for height and splendor far out- 
rivalled it. The valleys in her literary 
landscape are sometimes low indeed ; a few 
even have noxious growths in them, and 
are haunted by foolish wills-o'-the-wisp. 
Such, I should say, are her first few sus- 
tained works, like " Granville de Vigne " 
and '^ Strathmore." Nor has she always 
clung to the talisman by which she after- 
ward learned to invoke her best creations. 
At times she has seemed to cast this tem- 
porarily away, as in '' Friendship " and 
'* A Winter City." I have now reached, as 
it were, my one sole conclusion regarding 
her abilities at their finest and securest 
outlook. She is an idealis t^_ajL d that .she 
^hould h ave determinedl y remained . The 
foibles of modern society are no subjects 
for either her dissection or her satire. She 
has never been any more able to become a 
Thackeray or a Dickens than the)^, under 
any conceivable circumstances, could have 
become Ouidas. It is an immense thing 
for a writer to recognize juslT^hat he is 



The Truth about Oiiida. i6i 

capable^fjoino^best , and to leave all fh a 
rest alone. But Ouida, with a burning un- 
easiness, has continually misunderstood her 
own noble gifts. With an e3'e that could 
look undimmed at the sun, she has too 
often grown weary of his beams. Once 
sure of her wings, white and strong as they 
proved, she had nothing to seek except the 
soft welcome of the air for which they 
were so buoyantly fitted. But no : she has 
repeatedly folded them and walked instead 
of flying. Birds that fly with grace do not 
oft en walk so^ She is a~poet, and she ha's 



Torgotten this truth with a pertinacity 
which has been a deprivation to the litera- 
ture of her time. And yet for several 3''ears 
after the publication of ''Tricotrin" the 
idealist was most hopefully paramount in 
all that she did. If " Folle-Farine " had 
been her first book instead of her sixth or 
seventh, it would have made even the Eng- 
lish blood that she has more than once de- 
clared so sluggish, tingle with glad appre- 
ciation of its loveliness. The change in her 
was for a time absolute and thorough. 
'' Folle-Farine " was the story of a despised 
outcast girl, ignorant and unlettered, yet 
with a soul quick to estimate and treasure 
the worth and meaning of beauty wherever 



/ 



1 62 The Truth about Ouida. 

found. It is all something which the real- 
ists would pull long faces or giggle at as 
hopelessly ^'highfalutin." But then the 
realists, when they ride their hobby with a 
particularly martial air, are inclined quite 
to trample all poetry below its hoofs. I 
don't know how well the story of " Folle- 
Farine " would please some of Balzac's suc- 
cessors, but I am sure that he himself would 
have delighted in it. The girl's infancy 
among the gypsies and subsequent fierce 
persecution at the hands of her grandfather, 
Claudis Flamma, as one devil-begotten and 
loathsome, are treated with an intensity 
bordering on the painful. But through all 
the youthful anguish and martyrdom of 
" Folle-Farine " there flows a charming 
current of idyllic feeling. Such passages 
as these, stamped with the individuality 
of Ouida, meet us on every page : " In 
one of the m.ost fertile and fair districts of 
Northern France there was a little Norman 
town, very, very old, and beautiful exceed- 
ingly by reason of its ancient streets, its 
high peaked roofs, its marvellous galle- 
ries and carvings, its exquisite grays and 
browns, its silence and its color, and its 
rich still life. Its centre was a great cathe- 
dral, noble as York or Chartres ; a cathedral 



TJie Truth about Ouida. 163 



whose spire shot to the clouds, and whose 
innumerable towers and pinnacles were all 
pierced to the day, so that the blue sky shone 
and the birds of the air flew all through 
them. A slow brown river, broad enough 
for market-boats and for corn-barges, stole 
through the place to the sea, lapping as it 
went the wooden piles of the houses, and 
reflecting the quaint shapes of the carvings, 
the hues of the signs and the draperies, the 
dark spaces of the dormer windows, the 
bright heads of some casement-cluster pf 
carnations, the laughing face of a girl lean- 
ing out to smile on her lover." 

This certainly is not what we call com- 
pact writing ; there is none of that neat- 
ness and trimness about it which bespeak 
the deliberative pen or the compunctious 
eraser. But what a sensuous and winsome 
poetic effect does it produce ! Fev/ writers 
can afford the loose clauses, the random 
laissez-allej', of Ouida. She sometimes 
abuses her assumed privilege, even in her 
most authentic moments — those, I mean, 
of pure imagination. But it is then that 
the superabundance of her diction and its 
careless yet shining fluency hardly ever lose 
their attractiveness. It is then that the 
prolixity to which I have before referred is 



164 The TrutJi about Quid a. 

an attribute we are glad to pardon, and 
love while we are doing so. The argument 
of " Folle-Farine " soon ceases to deal with 
the sufferings of a child. The poor crea- 
ture's hopeless love for the cold and un- 
consciously heedless Arslan, bitter at the 
world's indifference to those magnificent 
gods and goddesses that he still goes on 
painting in his old granary among water- 
docks and rushes there by the river-side, 
is portrayed with unnumbered masterly 
strokes. And afterward, when Folle-Farine 
tends him as he lies stricken with fever in 
a Parisian attic, the evil temptings of the 
unprincipled Sartorian, as they offer life 
and fame to Arslan at a price whose infamy 
cannot be questioned by her who hears 
them, cloud this whole narrative with a 
truly terrible gloom. FoUe-Farine's immo- 
lation of self to save him whom she wor- 
ships, and her final self-inflicted death amid 
the peace of the river-reeds, far away from 
the loud and gilded Paris that she detests, 
are the very darkest essence of the most 
absorbing and desolating tragedy. But 
the poetry of this whole fervid conception 
is never once lost sight of. We close the 
book with a shudder, as if we had been 
passing through the twilight of some magic 



TJic TrutJi about Ouida, 165 

forest where the dews are death. But we 
reaHze how matchless is the sorcery that 
can so sombrely enchain us, and long after 
its woful spell has vanished memory vi- 
brates with the pity and sorrow it roused. 
''Ariadne" is another masterpieee, and 
not unlike the foregoing in the main sources 
of its excessive melancholy. It is the story 
of a feminine spirit swayed by an unrecip- 
rocated love, as waywardly given as lightly 
undervalued. The characters are without 
subtlety, as in all Ouida's prose-poems. 
They are fascinating or repelling shadows, 
whom we can name adoration, egotism, 
fidelity, as we please, but whose eerie jux- 
tapositions, whose pictorial and half-illu- 
sory surroundings, may summon sensations 
not unlike those caused in us by some ad- 
mirable yet faded fresco. Never was Rome, 
in all her grandeur and desuetude, made 
the more majestic background of a heart's 
forlorn history. We read of " the silver 
lines of the snow new-fallen on the mount- 
ains against the deep rose of dawn ;" of 
how " shadows of the night steal softly from 
off the city, releasing, one by one, dome 
and spire and cupola and roof, till all the 
wide white wonder of the place ennobles 
itself under the broad brightness of full 



1 66 TJie Truth about Ouida. 

day ;" of how one can *'go down into the 
dark cool streets, with the pigeons flutter- 
ing in the fountains, and the sounds of the 
morning chants coming from many a church 
door and convent window, and little schol- 
ars and singing-children going by with 
white clothes on, or scarlet robes, as though 
walking forth from the canvas of Botticelli 
or Garofalo." Sculpture forms what one 
might call the pervading stimulus of this 
most impassioned story, its young heroine 
being a sculptor of inspired powers. In the 
same way music supplies an incessant ac- 
companiment for the glowing words of 
'' Signa." The youth v^^ho gives his name 
to the book is a musician who possesses 
something more glorious than mere apti- 
tude. Psychologically it is the reverse of 
"Ariadne," delineating the torment of a 
man who puts faith in the most shallow 
and vacant female nature. It is just as 
plaintive, just as haunting, as its prede- 
cessor, but it is simpler, less penetrative 
and less wide-circling, less Dantesque in 
its mournful dignity and less astonishing 
through its scholarship. These three prose- 
poems, " Folle-Farine," "Ariadne" and 
" Signa," ai-e the three high alps of Ouida's 
accomplishment thus far. It is not easy 



TJie Truth about Ouida. 167 

to praise them with full justice, because 
unrestrained panegyric is never that, and 
yet the lyrical spontaneity of the works 
themselves — their evidence of having won 
their splendid vitality by having been 
poured from the writer's inmost heart, as 
warm as that heart's blood — would tempt 
one who had fully felt their strength, orig- 
inality and greatness, to dip his pen in ex- 
ceedingly rosy ink and then shape with it 
very ardent encomiums. I am far from call- 
ing these memorable undertakings *' idyls," 
as Miss Preston terms them, or in any man- 
ner agreeing that " Friendship " ''marks a 
distinct intellectual advance." 

Here was a woman who had shown us as 
no one else, living or dead, ever had shown 
in precisely the same way, that she could 
make the sweetest and most impressive 
poetry do service as the medium for telling 
the sweetest and most impressive of tales. 
Mixed with their Gothic fantasy there was 
something Homeric in these three volumes 
which I have before named. There were 
no touches that reminded us at all of the 
modern novel. Each had its separate 
aesthetic haze clingingabout it, and a golden 
haze this was, in every case. With only a 
few changes here and there, the atmosphere 



1 68 The TnitJi about Ouida. 

of each story might have been made Greek, 
or even Egyptian. The delights or horrors 
of life were put most strikingly under our 
vision; but the details of life, the routine 
of things an jour le jour, the trifling modes 
and customs of mortality, as it pursues its 
whims, its vices, its flirtations, its amours, 
its divorce-suits, all remained remote and 
unconsidered. The glamour of dream clung 
to every character and event. The joys and 
miseries outroUed before us were as abstract 
and aloof, when viewed with relation to our 
morning mail or our menaced butcher's- 
bill, as the loves of Paris and Helen in the 
Iliad, or of Ulysses and Calypso in the 
Odyssey. These three enticing stories no 
more concerned our bread-and-butter-get- 
ting existences of prosaic actuality than 
they concerned the wash of tides at either 
pole. We turned their glowing leaves to 
escape from our own silent quarrel with 
realities rather than to meet the monoto- 
nous recurrence of them either photographed 
painstakingly or sketched felicitously. In 
other words, we gave ourselves up to the 
alternately gentle or stormy wizardries of 
a poet, contented in the oblivion thus be- 
gotten for decorated statistics of the annal- 
ist or placid vivisections of the surgeon. 



TJie Truth about Oiiida. 169 

I am aware that all such departure from 
his cherished modern standards must at 
once be tyrannously cried dovv^n as a bore 
by that self-satisfied arbiter, the average 
reader of to-day. Perhaps Ouida felt some 
necessity of propitiating this multiform 
custodian of profit and loss. It may have 
been that her publishers told her, with that 
sincere sadness born of financial depression, 
how much handsomer had been the " re- 
turns" from '' Strathmore" and " Chandos" 
than from ''Ariadne" or ''Signa." Be this 
as it may, Ouida forsook her new gods, and, 
except in the composition of some exquisite 
short pieces which recalled the purity, the 
human breadth and the past star-like ra- 
diance of "A Provence Rose," "A Dog of 
Flanders" and *' The Nlirnberg Stove," I 
do not know of her having ever again hewn 
her statues from the same flawless Pentelic 
marble. 

But the resumption of her old more ma- 
terialistic task — that of writing novels 
which should reflect the doings and misdo- 
ings of her own century — she was now pre- 
pared to undertake with a much firmer 
hand and with an unquestionably chastened 
sense of old delinquencies. The tale 
*' Friendship" may be said to commemorate 



170 The Truth about On Ida. 

this unfortunate transition. It marks the 
third distinct change in Ouida's mental 
posture toward her public. It is to me a 
descent and not an elevation, and yet I 
freely concede that the novelist rcdiviva was 
in every way superior to the novelist who 
lived and rhapsodized before. In " Friend- 
ship" we see much of the flare and glare 
once thrown upon every-day occurrences 
tempered to a far more tolerable light. 
Deformity often takes the lines of just pro- 
portion, and not seldom of amiable sym- 
metry as well. Miss Preston praises 
"Friendship" as pre-eminently readable in 
every part, and here I should again differ 
from her, since in my judgment the book 
contains a great deal of insufferable tedium. 
Ouida's worst fault as a stylist is here laid 
tormentingly bare. She harps with such 
stress of repetition upon the guilty bondage 
of Prince loris to Lady Joan Challoner that 
the perpetual circumlocution makes a kind 
of maelstrom in which interest becomes at 
last remorselessly swallowed. It has been 
stated that incidents and characters in 
" Friendship" were taken from Ouida's own 
life, and that Lady Joan Challoner's name 
conceals one belonging to a foe of the au- 
thor. Whether this report be true or false, 



TJic TrutJi about Ouida. 171 

we resent the almost maliciously periphras- 
tic style in which we are told again and 
again that Lady Joan was the jailer of loris 
and watched him struggle in vain with the 
gyves of his own sin. To have a nature of 
the most detestable selfishness described 
over and over till we are familiar with its 
meanest im.pulse, its narrowest spite, re- 
sembles being seated by a person of repul- 
sive physiognomy in a chamber lined with 
mirrors. The reduplications become un- 
bearable to us, till we take the only feasible 
course for avoiding them: we go into an- 
other apartment. Still, in the present case, 
I did not go into another apartment; I fin- 
ished "Friendship," and received from it an 
impression as vivid as disagreeable. Cest 
le ton qui fait la iniisiquc, and this story, not- 
withstanding its eternity of repetitions, 
appeared to me told in a querulous, railing 
voice which robbed it of charm. But it 
evinces a most undeniable improvement in 
method. The sentences are terser and 
crisper than in those other adolescent nov- 
els, and the syntax is no longer straggling 
and hazardous. Of a certain redundancy 
Ouida has never wholly rid herself. The 
effort to do so is manifest in her later books, 
but it still remains a v/eakness with her to 



1/2 The Truth about Ouida. 

tell us the same thing a number of times, 
and with only a comparative alteration of 
phraseology. Still, no one — not even Bal- 
zac himself — has a more succinct ^dry, 
poi gnant w ^y of pu tting epigram. It seems 
to me that she is without humor ; her fun 
inevitably stings as wit alone can do ; that 
soft phosphorescent play of geniality wiiich 
would try to set its reflex gleam in the 
stony gaze of a gorgon, appears quite un- 
known to her. She has been wise, too, in 
not cultivating humor, for it is something 
which must fall upon a writer from heaven : 
he might as well try and train himself into 
having blue eyes instead of black. But 
Ouida has trained many of her qualities, and 
the self-seaich with which she has done so 
has betokened the most scourge-like rigors. 
The novelist in her is to me all a matter of 
talent vigilantly guarded and nurtured ; 
the poetic part of her — the part to which 
we are indebted for three supreme achieve- 
ments — could not have helped delivering 
its beautiful message. Afterward Ouida 
remembered that she was somebody quite 
outside of what one would call a genius — 
that she was a woman of enormously ver- 
satile information, and that the possibility 
of her writinof novels v;hich would excite a 



The Trutii about Oiiida. 173 

great deal of public attention could scarcely 
be overestimated. Beyond doubt she had 
now reached a state of dexterity as regarded 
mere craftsmanship which thoroughly 
eclipsed the crudity of former times. But 
just as she had been raw and experimental 
in a way quite her own, so was she now 
adroit, self- restrained and professional with 
a similar freshness. 

'' Moths" came next, and was a book 
sought and commented upon, admired and 
execrated, from St. Petersburg to San Fran- 
cisco. Of all her novels, this is perhaps 
the one which has brought her the greatest 
number of readers in what may be set down 
as the third period of her singular celebrity. 
It is filled with the most drastic interest 
for even the most jaded and cnniiye exam- 
iner. The story is the perfection of enter- 
tainment, of diversion. Its sarcastic scorn 
of fashionable frailties and flippancies even 
surpasses that which made " Friendship" 
notorious. Social life among the most 
aristocratic people of Europe is drawn so 
sumptuously and prismatically that with- 
out ever having enjoyed the honor of din- 
ing or supping with princes and duchesses, 
we still own to a secret revolt against the 
verisimilitude of their recorded pastimes 



1/4 ^/''^' TnitJi about Ouida. 

and dissipations. In " Moths," as in all her 
purely fictional and unpoetic work, Ouida 
gives us the belief tiiat she is flying her 
kite entirely too high, that she is too greatly 
enamoured of the rank and titles of her 
dukes and carls, that the European beau 
7nonde, as an idea, has too bewilderingly in- 
toxicated her fancy. As Balzac delighted 
in letting us know the exact number of 
francs per annum possessed by alm.ost 
every member of his Comedie Humaine, so 
Ouida loves to tell us of her grandees' cas- 
tles and palaces, of \h€\v fetes and uiusicales, 
of their steam-yachts and their four-in- 
hands, of their "private physicians" (it is 
rarely one simple ph\sician with her), of 
their multitudinous retainers and servants. 
Her heroines go to their apartments to 
dress, and in so doing give themselves up 
to their "women:" it is seldom that any 
one of them is humbly enough placed to 
have merely a single y>;/?/;/<? de charnbre. All 
the horses are blooded animals, all the 
jewels priceless, all the repasts miracles of 
gastronomy, all the ladies' toilets royally 
costly. Saloons and boudoirs and bed- 
chambers are adorned with wonders of 
modern art, on canvas or in marble, in 
tapestry or bric-a-brac, in panellings or 



The Truth about Ouida. 175 

frescos. Nearly every new book that she 
writes is a sort of edition de luxe of itself. 
I am by no means sure that she does not 
smile at the dazzling glories which she 
evokes, while continuing to spread them 
before us with a secret conviction that they 
will allure hundreds and even thousands, 
though they repel tens and twenties, of 
those whom they confront. What to many 
refined observers may have seemed a streak 
of trivial childishness in her may be, after 
all, a shrewder cleverness than these ac- 
credit her with. For Ouida is superlatively 
clever ; indeed, it may be added by those 
whom none of her sham glitterings have 
blinded to the genuineness of her actual 
gold, that she is lamentably clever. Had 
she thought less of a certain transient ap- 
plause which w^riters incomparably beneath 
her may win, she might much sooner have 
attained that firm fame during her lifetime 
which lier death alone will now create. In 
" Moths" the cleverness to vvdiich I have 
alluded is everywhere apparent. She has 
made it a story that the shop-girl or the 
dry-goods clerk may read with thrills and 
tears. Vera's horrible misfortune in hav- 
ing been sold by her mother to the brutish 
Russian prince admits of no misinterpreta- 



1/6 The Truth about Ouida. 

tion. The vast command of wealth and 
the lofty station which now follow for 
the dreamy and statuesque heroine are skil- 
fully blended with her love for the brilliant 
marquis-tenor Correze and the distressing 
captivity of her jewelled chains. There is 
a strong suggestion of the " penny dread- 
fuls " in the whole entourage of the tale, 
with Vera's anguished heart beating under 
robes of velvet and her tortured brain 
throbbing under coronets of gems. But it 
is immeasurably above the vulgarity of 
those gaudy and often mawkish serials. 
Its pathos is intense, and its continuous 
intervals of pure poetry are undeniable. It 
is dramatic, too, in the very strictest sense, 
and its adaptation for the English stage 
was naturally to be expected. As for what 
the moralists would call its "lesson," I 
should affirm that to be exempt from the 
least chance of misconstruction. Like all 
these later stories of Ouida's, " Moths " has 
been denounced as grossly unwholesome 
for young minds. I do not know about 
young minds gaining benefit from its pe- 
rusal ; I should imagine that, like many 
things which minors do not understand, its 
effect upon them might be harmful, and 
even noxious. So is llie effect of rich 



The Truth about Ouida, 177 

dishes and indigestible fruit upon young 
stomachs, while stronger gastric juices 
sustain no hurt from their consumption. 
It is time that this outcry against what is 
evil in literature for young minds should 
be silenced by a sensible consideration of 
how potent or impotent are the defences 
reared by educators and guardians. It 
would surely be unwise to cut down all the 
apple-orchards because in those days which 
precede autumn's due ripeness multitudes 
of foraging children have brought on them- 
selves avoidable colics. If the colics sleep 
in the undeveloped apples, and mischiev- 
ous little Adams and Eves 7i'/7/ taste thereof, 
a stout wall and an ill-tempered dog behind 
it are the only trustworthy preventives 
against their temerity. To claim that 
Ouida's works are not healthful reading 
for those whose youth makes the mere 
mention of evil and vice deleterious be- 
cause in all their bad meanings unexplain= 
able, is to claim, I think, that any author 
may be misunderstood provided the men- 
tality of his public is sufficiently meagre 
for his miscomprehension. The decried 
'' immorality" of Ouida I have never at all 
been able to perceive. I ignore the ques- 
tion of her immoral purport in the prose- 



1/8 The TriitJi about Ouida. 

poems heretofore treated. There such a 
discussion wears colors of absurdity ; it is 
almost as if some one should assure me 
Milton's Satan was a matter of shame to 
his portrayer. But with regard to all 
Ouida's novels of what I have called her 
third period, the accusation (and it is a 
very wide accusation) becomes at least 
v.'orthy of attention. Ouida has no hesita- 
tion in referring to relations between the 
sexes which common conventionality has 
reprobated and condemned. A great deal 
of her more modern work deals frankly with 
this theme. Sometimes it is dealt with in 
tones and terms of a most scathing irony ; 
again it is handled with mixed disdain and 
ridicule ; and still again it is openly grieved 
over and deplored. But I fail to find a 
single instance of the vileness of adultery 
being either condoned or alleviated. To 
choose an uncanny subject is very different 
from handling the subject with the grosser 
motive of extenuating what is base in it. 
I should assert that Ouida never — abso- 
lutely never — does the latter. There are 
one or two scenes in '"'■ Moths " which have 
a shocking nudity of candor. But they 
are never dwelt upon for the purpose of 
pandering to any despicable taste in the 



The TrutJi about Oiiicia. 179 

reader. They form a link in the dolorous 
chain-work of the heroine's ills, and they 
are introduced for the purpose of render- 
ing her final step of rebellion against 
the world's legally imposed pressure more 
pardonably consistent with the whole 
scheme of her unsolicited mishaps. While 
revealing what she believes to be low and 
contemptible in society of to-day, Ouida 
employs merely the weapons which Juvenal 
himself made use of. She is never sympa- 
thetic with wrong-doing, any more than 
the Latin poet was in fulminating against 
Roman decadence. Witness, as an exam- 
ple of this impersonal sincerity, her un- 
sparing denunciations hurled at such char- 
acters as Lady Joan in "Friendship" and 
Lady Dolly in '' Moths." How cordially 
she seems to detest the artificiality of ev- 
^.ry mauvais siijet she describes ! She lays 
bare alike the sordid and the sensual aim; 
she pierces with her shafts of wit and hate 
the adventurer, the hypocrite, the scandal- 
monger, the titled voluptuary, the menda- 
cious and guileful male flirt, the modest- 
visaged and still more deceptive intrigante. 
But through all her danse viaeabre of ill- 
behaved people there is no revelation wliich 
mav even faintly indicate that she is in anv 



i8o TJic Truih about Ouida. 

way sympathetic with their indiscreet or 
reckless caperings. For those who shout 
Ouida down as abominable because she 
chooses to touch the abominable, I have 
no answer. All that point of view merely 
involves the question of whether the abomi- 
nable can be touched or not in literature, 
provided it is so approached and so grasped 
that the author makes its mirk and stain 
seem nothing but the soilure and grossness 
which they really are. I am acquainted 
with several American men of letters who 
have told me that they deeply regret the 
broad public distaste for so-called "in- 
decency" in novel-writing. These men 
have already written novels of merit and 
force, but they greatly desire to write nov- 
els which may express the full scope and 
depth of life as they see and feel it. They 
declare them.selves, however, debarred from 
such performance by the stringent edicts 
of their publishers and editors. It seems 
to me that Ouida has quietly contemned 
the inclinations of her publishers and edi- 
tors. She has chosen to tell the whole 
truth — not as Zola tells it, but as George 
Sand (whom she resembles in one way as 
much as she resembles Victor Hugo in 
another) always chose uncompromisingly 



The Truth about Quid a. i8i 

to tell it. Her gorgeousness of surround- 
ing has made her perfectly pure and refor- 
matory motive dim to those who cannot 
eliminate from the scum and reek of a stag- 
nant pool the iridescence filmed there. 
Ouida has seen the rainbow colors close- 
clinging to such malodorous torpor in 
human society, and she has striven to re- 
port of them as faithfully as of the brackish 
waters below. But she has intensified 
their baleful tints. She has made the er- 
mine that wraps her sinful potentates too 
white and the black spots which indent 
this ermine too inky. She is and has al- 
ways been incapable of saying to her muse 
what Mr. Lowell says in his profound 
though pietistic poem, "The Cathedral:" 

'■ Oh, more than half-way turn that Grecian front 
Upon me, while with half-rebuke I spell, 
On the plain fillet that confines thy hair 
In conscious bounds of seeming unconstraint, 
The N'aught iji overplus, thy race's badge !" 

No; Ouida determinedly delights in 
overplus, and when one thinks of her muse 
at all it is of a harried and overtaxed muse, 
with feverish imprecations against the wear 
and tear to which divinity has been heart- 
lessly subjected. When I turn toward the 



1 82 The Triith abo^it Oiiida. 

novels which have succeeded " Moths," I 
am constrained to declare Ouida a writer 
more fertile in expedients for disillusioning 
her most loyal adherents than any other 
known through the past centuries as one 
deserving the name of a genius. She is so 
incontestably a genius, however, that she 
can go on committing her excesses without 
alienating her leal devotees. She is like 
some monarch confident of his subjects' 
worship while he crowns himself with roses 
and quaffs wine from gold beakers to the 
detriment and discontent of throngs wait- 
ing at his gates. There are no throngs 
waiting at Ouida's gates, however ; or 
rather the throngs are her entranced read- 
ers, and not by any means those fastidious 
about the requirements of true royalty. 
But a few, knowing her grand mind, re- 
gret the self-forgetfulness to which it has 
stooped. 

*' In Maremma" startled these few, as 
if it were a pledge of permanent return 
among the classic idealisms which have 
made this author's best right to assert her- 
self one of the greatest figures in contem- 
porary literature. And "In Maremma" is 
a tale of matchless grace and sweetness. 
We marvel as we read of the Italian girl 



The Truth about Ouida, 183 

who went and dwelt in the Etruscan tomb, 
loving the dead whom she found buried 
there, and finally meeting in it, by a most 
terrible satire of circumstances, him who 
dealt her a death-wound of passion — we 
marvel, I say, as we read of this delicious, 
free-souled, innocent kinswoman to Folle- 
Farine and Ariadne, how any human brain 
could be so multiplex and many-shaded as 
that of Ouida. What gulfs of difference 
separate this new heroine of hers from 
the world-encompassed and society-beset 
beings whom she has so recently pictured ! 
And yet for a time the novelist has dropped 
her microscope (often so foolishly misem- 
ployed) and the poet has resumed her 
neglected lyre. Their old notes are still 
struck with dulcet harmony. " In Marem- 
ma'' is Ouida again at her loftiest and 
most authentic. She shows in it her old 
impetuous desire to feel with and for the 
persecuted and maltreated of the earth. I 
cannot explain why it should not be ranked 
with the three great masterpieces to which 
I have already made such enthusiastic 
reference. Pehaps it should be so ranked. 
If there is any excuse for depriving it of a 
place on this exquisite list, that excuse 
must be found in its more earthy raison 



184 The Triith about Oiiida, 

d'etre when compared with the almost ethe- 
real spirituality of the other books. 

" Wanda," " Princess Napraxine," and 
" Othmar," coming afterward with a speed 
of succession that showed the most earnest 
industry, have given proof of their author's 
second return to at least relative realism. 
But "Wanda" is a romance of inexpressi- 
ble grace and force. It is the purest ro- 
mance: to speak of it as highly colored 
is like calling a particularly rich sunset 
overfraught with glows and tints. Judging 
it by the modern methods of the " natural- 
istic" school is to pronounce it a monstrosity 
of art. But a great many of the elder Du- 
mas's works would suffer in a like way if so 
considered, and nearly every prose line of 
Hugo's would fall under the same ban of dis- 
favor. " Wanda" is a great romantic story. 
Its mode of telling is one protracted intensi- 
ty. Its fires burn with a raging and heavy- 
odored flame. But they spring forth, for all 
that, with no ungoverned madness. They 
are kindled by a hand desirous of their 
heat and curl but avoidant of their reck- 
less outflow. It is very easy to denounce 
such a tale as vulgar. In these final years 
of our dying century all literary fierce- 
ness and eagerness of this kind are so de- 



The Truth about Ouida, 185 

nounced. If romanticism is to fade away 
forever, this volcanic bit of sensationalism 
is undoubtedly doomed. But its sensation- 
alism is of the sort we think of when we 
remind ourselves of "Monte Christo " and 
" Le Juif Errant." The haughty Austrian 
countess, with her prestige of stainless 
pedigree and her imperial self-esteem, — 
the Russian serf who has concealed his 
disgraceful birth under a stolen title, — 
the Hungarian nobleman of almost kingly 
rank and unblemished honor, who con- 
temptuously lays bare the shameful brand 
of imposture in his rival, — the ancestral 
castle in the Tyrol, with obeisant swarms 
of vassals and its regal household admin- 
istration, — all these are the old materials 
and manoeuvres of " Strathmore " and 
" Idalia," but presented with tenfold more 
adroitness and savoir /aire. The secret of 
reading "Wanda" with the keenest relish 
for its exuberant ardors must lie in com- 
plete forgetfulness of life as it is and pious 
acceptance of life as it might be. But this 
is the test by which nearly all romance is 
tried. I have no space to treat at length 
of " Princess Napraxine " and its sequel, 
" Othmar ;" but if space were broadly al- 
lowed me I could state of them no more 



1 86 The Truth about Ouida, 

and no less than I have already stated of 
"Wanda." Princess Napraxine herself is 
a silly and patience-taxing person. Ouida's 
enemies must have exulted in her as " im- 
moral," v-'hich she indeed truly would be 
were she not so transparently Ir'gerc. Th.e 
chief pity is that so fine a fellow as Othmar 
should have done anything except disdain 
her. But both these two last novels teem 
with pages of description, reflection, ten- 
derness, sweetness and pathos which make 
the fact doubly sad that Princess Naprax- 
ine (a pedant, a prig and a strutting com- 
bination of silliness and bad manners) 
should ever have been summoned to blot 
and mar them by her paltry charlatanisms. 
The isolated position held by Ouida in an 
age when principles and theories essentially 
opposite to her own have seemingly cap- 
tured the world of letters, would of itself 
point to endowments both rare and sturdy. 
That she has pushed her way into renown 
against obstacles which were often all the 
more stubborn because they were of her 
own rearing, is a matter for serious inquir}' 
and reflection ; but that she should have 
forced from certain able contemporaries 
who originally satirized and flouted her, 
the respect and homage whicli we pay to 



The Truth about Ouida. 187 

transcendent competency, is a still more 
significant truth. It means that Ouida 
must mount to her place of deserved 
state in spite of faults which would shape 
for many another writer stairways with a 
wholly different direction. But there has 
seldom been a writer whose virtues and 
vices were so inextricably blended. For 
example, the very people, in her stories of 
fashionable society, who conduct them- 
selves with the least lucid common-sense 
perpetually spice their repartees and rail- 
leries with a most engaging wit. We may 
not sympathize with what they say, but 
we are keenly amused by their modes of 
saying it. Disraeli, whom I believe Ouida 
sincerely admires as a novelist, possesses 
all her love for palatial filigree and por- 
phyry ; yet he has nothing of her sprightli- 
ness, crispness and z^^rz'^when telling us of 
the bores, the simpletons and the few passa- 
bly bright people who make up ''society." 
In more than a single way Ouida is be- 
hind her time, — a time over whose rather 
barren-looking levels of analysis and for- 
mulation she flings the one large light of ro- 
mance now visible. In this latter respect 
she is, indeed, a kind of glorious anachro- 
nism, but from another stand-point her 



1 88 The Truth about Ouida. 

grooves of thought appear painfully nar- 
row. Occasionally she airs a contempt for 
her own sex which makes us wish that with 
all her learning she knew a little more of 
the dispassionate repose taught by science, 
and of its hardy feuds against reckless as- 
sumptions. Ouida has made declarations 
about womankind which cause us to won- 
der how she can possibly have been so un- 
fortunate in her feminine friends, with the 
thousands of chaste and lovable women 
now to be met inside the limits of civiliza- 
tion. The maiivaise langue, when turned 
against womanhood, is nowadays classed 
among effete frivolities. What we forgave 
at the beginning of the century, on this 
head, we nov/ simply dismiss as beneath 
anything like grave heed. The day has 
passed when such Byronics of misogyny, 
however gilt with flashing sarcasms, will 
either delude or solace. We leave " sneers 
at the sex " to the idleness of otherwise 
unemployed club-loungers, whose growls 
are innocuous. Still, in justice to Ouida, I 
should deny that her hatred of women ever 
reached anything like an offensive boiling- 
point except in the early novel "Puck," 
which has probably done as much to feed 
the spleen of her enemies as any work to 



TJ'.e Truth about Ouida. 189 

which she has given her name. In subse- 
quent novels she has created many women 
of great sweetness and high-mindedness, as 
P^toile in "Friendship," Vera in ''Moths," 
Wanda in the story of that title, Yseult 
in " PrinceGS Napraxine," and Damaris in 
''Othmar." Perhaps a depraved and sin- 
ful woman is more execrable than a man 
of the same perverted traits. This is a 
question open to debate, though Ouida 
somehow suggests an opposite judgment. 
It is true that the majority of her very bad 
people are not men, though she is capable, 
at a pinch, of some darkly Mephistophelian 
types. 

On the other hand, her love for the help- 
less and the unfriended, her profound char- 
ity toward the down-trodden and destitute 
and neglected among humanity, is one of 
the several bonds between her own genius 
and that of Hugo — a poet w'hom she re- 
sembles more than I have availed myself 
of opportunity to indicate. 

But I do not claim that these words about 
Ouida — though I have called them *' the 
truth," and though, as regards my own 
most sincere faith and equally sincere un- 
faith, I so insist upon calling them — are in 
any degree a satisfactory criticism. How 



1 90 The Triit/i about Ouida. 

this woman's littleness dies into a shadow 
beside her imaginative greatness, a real 
critic will hereafter tell. I have already 
stated in another essay my fixed belief 
concerning the scientific method which 
every critic who at all merits the place of 
one should infallibly use. For myself, I 
wish to be thought no more than that 
purveyor of opinions whom I have previ- 
ously sentenced with some emphasis. I 
simply print what I think and believe about 
Ouida, and I have declared it to be *'the 
truth " only as I see and realize truth. If 
it be falsehood, I shall welcome with glad- 
ness any actual critic who so proves it. 
But to satisfy me of my own errors he 
must not by any means deport himself in 
the same arbitrary and downright fashion 
as I have done. He must bear in mind 
that if he desires to convince me of my one- 
sidedness he must not oppose it with cHcta 
as unfoundedly hypothetical as my own. 
He must not be a man who profusely deals, 
as I do, in unverified declarations. He 
must logically elucidate to me where I am 
wrong and why I am right. It occurs to 
me, with that vanity of all essayists who 
temporarily have the field quite to them- 



TJic Truth about Oiiida. 191 

selves, that I am more often right than 
wrong. But if I am conchisively proved 
more often wrong than right by that sys- 
tem of acute investigation w^hich only the 
science-bred critic understands, then I shall 
still feel that I have been of marked service 
to the writer thus empirically reviewed ; 
for I shall at least have made myself a 
means of rousing careful and faithful con- 
sideration toward a series of imaginative 
works thus far either unreasonably con- 
temned or irresponsibly lauded. The scien- 
tific tone and poise is so prevailing and 
favorite a one at the present time in works 
which a few years ago it rarely invaded, 
that I cannot help asking myself why the 
critics, who of all living persons are most 
easily accredited with the scientific tone 
and poise, should not more fondly and un- 
hesitatingly employ it. They almost uni- 
versally fail to employ it, however ; and on 
this account the wandering verbiage of 
their estimates may be said to be as value- 
less as the announcements which I now 
pluck up boldness enough to print. But 
my boldness has a weak fibre or two of 
cowardice in it, I fear, after all. I should 
never have presumed to write of Ouida a3 I 



192 The TnitJi about Oicida. 

have written, had I not prized her compo- 
sitions, frankly and de ban ca^ur, far more 
than I blame them. For this reason I have 
given my favorable views publicity. Ouida 
is so internationally popular that I am 
confident of friendly endorsements which 
will mitigate for me the necessary agony 
of being anathematized as her defender. 
There my cowardice stops — in a certainty 
of helpers and supporters. For the rest, 
if I am called names because I pay to a 
reigning genius what I hold as her rightful 
tribute, my stolid resignation will be equal 
to any martyr's. I shall endure the odium, 
certain of its ultimate destruction. Times 
change, and I think the day is not far dis- 
tant when Ouida will be amazed at the sov- 
ereign fame which she herself has builded 
through all these )^ears of failure and tri- 
umph, of weakness and power. But per- 
haps she will not be astonished at ail, being 
dead. Or perhaps . . . But I leave that 
point for the religionists and the agnostics 
to fight out between themselves. One gets 
immortality of a certain kind, now and then, 
wh^thtr pallida mors bring to us posthumous 
beatitude, brimstone or annihilation. And 
Ouida, I should insist (with deference to the 



The Truth about Ottida. 193 

coming scientific critic), has secured this 
terrene kind of immortality. I don't know 
whether or not she would rank it as a very- 
precious boon. To judge from a good 
many passages in her abundant writing, I 
should be inclined to decide negatively. 



SHOULD CRITICS BE GENTLEMEN? 

Not long ago I received from a lady of 
much culture and fine natural intelligence 
a letter whose chief contents chanced to 
bear upon a recent hostile newspaper no- 
tice of a book which she had herself cor- 
dially admired. One paragraph of this 
letter especially struck me. It ran thus : 

*' The attack upon Mr. 's book has 

served more than ever to convince me that 
there is something all wrong with modern 
'criticism' — so called. Why should not 
the same courtesy be preserved in writing 
of a book which accepted usage forces 
upon us in speaking of one before its au- 
thor ? Reckless personality is condemned 
in social intercourse as vulgar, and even 
odious; why should it be held admissible 
the instant that the reviewer takes up his 
pen ? I remember hearing, as a school-girl, 
of ' polite literature. Is politeness an im- 
perative requisite of literature alone, or are 
there simitar kindly demands upon the 

194 



Slioiild Critics be Gentle men? 195 

people who set themselves to consider it ? 
. . . Suppose we put into actual life 
the same ill-breeding which now exists 
among the newspaper critics. My hus- 
band, as you know, is a Wall Street bank- 
er. Imagine that some gentleman strolled 
of a morning into his office, and instead of 
the usual decent ' good-day,' began coolly 
to assure him that his business ability was 
overrated, that his financial success had 
been cheaply purchased, that he owed his 
present prosperity to a mere drift of luck, 
and that, taken altogether, he was a person 
of very little real consequence. I am 
nearly certain that my husband, under such 
circumstances, would become exceedingly 
angry. And if he added to his anger a flat 
request that this same outspoken individ- 
ual should never again cross his threshold, 
I am positive in my belief that hundreds 
of thoughtful and fair-minded outsiders 
would promptly support the course he had 
taken. . . . The great difficulty with all 
you literary people is that you almost 
wholly waive good manners in your dis- 
cussions of one another. You pour upon 
the book of a fellow-writer abuse which 
you would despise yourselves for venting 
if it were a question of his ill-cu.t coat, his 



1 96 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

inseparable squint or his hereditary freck- 
les. You draw quite too sharp a line be- 
tween what you may hold to be good criti- 
cism and what your own sense of common 
propriety has long ago convinced you to 
be good breeding." 

This communication, after I had read 
and pondered it, struck me as a somewhat 
lucid view of the whole matter. If not a 
comprehensive judgment, it is certainly 
one which contains the true reformatory 
element. There is perhaps no one of its 
factors with which civilization could less 
easily dispense than with that of courtesy. 
Imagine the horrors of a drawing-room or 
a dinner-table where everybody said to 
everybody else precisely what he consid- 
ered to be deserved or appropriate, regard- 
less of the pain it would cost. In the re- 
public of letters, it might be answered, we 
are supposed to replace formality by sin- 
cerity. That is not unlike the method, 
take it all in all, adopted by Robespierre 
in his republic. There was a great deal of 
sincerity about that. Critics and criticism 
there had it all their own way. It was an 
incisive way, and one essentially brutal. 
For the latter reason its admirers were 
numerous. 



Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 197 

Censure would find it hard to adequate- 
ly discountenance the arrogance and rude- 
ness of the newspaper critic as they exist 
at the present time. His effort to show 
mental superiority and notable acumen 
quite too often makes him forget that he 
is also expected to appear a gentleman. 
He may not be one (he is, alas ! too fre- 
quently the dreary reverse), but he is never- 
theless required to seem one by that very 
standard of high cultivation which he has 
so emphatically assumed. Even he would 
admit that there is something in good 
manners, after all. Only, it is difficult to 
remember manners while you are being 
radiantly judicial. The sun has beams 
that kill. Is it so painful a calamity that 
you should give some one poor Jones his 
quietus while you illuminate your entire 
period and pour consequent benefit on 
many Joneses ? 

I know the modern critic to be a very 
sensitive person, — quite as much so as the 
most thin-skinned poet who ever bled un- 
der his bodkin. I have never been able 
to explain this peculiarity except through 
the tremulous effects of an evil conscience. 
It is constantly manifest, however, and it 
has more than once led me to realize the 



193 



keenness of those shocks which its posses- 
sor must find himself called on to sustain 
when he encounters printed impressions of 
fellow-critics diametrically different from 
his own. That he is always finding him- 
self disagreed with there can be no admis- 
sible doubt. I don't know what heroic 
self-reliance buoys up his sense of infalli- 
bility under these trying conditions. For 
my own part, I have more than once ex- 
amined with amusement the variations be- 
tween the verdicts passed by " authori- 
ties " upon my own humble work. I have 
read the eulogies of Rhadamanthus in the 
Tomahawk till my cheeks tingled with 
pleasurable blushes. " How entirely charm- 
mg of Rhadamanthus !" I have said to 
myself. "He understands me; he and I 
are kindred souls, and the next time I 
meet him on Broadway I hope it will be 
lunch-time, so that I can ask him to join 
me somewhere for a chop and a swallov/ 
of claret." Then I have taken up the 
Hatchet^ and discovered that Minos thinks 
I have just added new indignity to the 
persecutions of an over-patient public. I 
am styleless and flaccid; I am aspiring, 
but effete; I have blundered into a pseudo- 
reputation, and am a complex junction of 



Should Critics be Gciiilcincii ? 199 

dulness, falsity and feebleness. This both 
alarms and depresses me. I ask myself, 
with the vague and meek ratiocination of 
one simultaneously petted and persecuted, 
how I can be, on account of the same piece 
of literary achievement, at once wise and 
foolish, profound and shallow, talented 
and vacuous. But the Lancet soon reas- 
sures me. I am, according to .^acos, 
neither large nor small; it is quite ex- 
plained now : I am simply a nice blending 
of mediocrity and industry. Here are 
three mighty judges, all stoutly opposed 
to one another. They cannot all be right; 
and if one is right the other two are fatally 
wrong. But how shattering to my own 
impulses of reverence ! It is like a vulgar 
family quarrel in the household of Jupi- 
ter. 

These discordances of opinion are not 
occasional; they occur every day. They 
are to my mind the great proof of how ab- 
surdly needless are all published comments 
on books in current newspapers. Many 
an author might find two or three of his 
works adorning the " parlor table" of some 
" flat " in Harlem owned by the reviewer 
who has hotly abused them all during past 
months. This gentleman has no doubt 



200 SJiould Critics be Gentlaneii ? 

forgotten his own abuse. Perhaps he has 
really read the books afterward, unpro- 
fessionally, as it were, in the quiet of his 
own home and beneath the light of his 
evening lamp, enjoying their contents. 
Most fair and thoughtful criticism is of 
necessity kindly, and you are very apt to 
cut a sorry figure in recommending a book 
which you have not thoroughly read. In 
nine cases out of ten your praise rings false 
and silly, for your ignorance of what you 
are praising betrays itself, like the piece 
of futile hypocrisy it is. You resemble a 
maid who rouges her mistress in a dim 
light; there is danger of the lady's nose 
getting a little rosy accidental spot on its 
tip. But the criticism that puts down its 
head like a bull and " makes " for a book 
never requires the least preparation, pre- 
meditation. Not very long ago I met a 
critic who engaged me in conversation on 
the subject of more than one recent book 
which I myself happened carefully to have 
read, and which he had presumably read, 
as he had reviewed each of them. To my 
surprise, he spoke of one these books in 
tones of extreme praise. He had forgot- 
ten, no doubt, that he had ever denounced 
it. I could not help feeling that I should 



Should Critics be Gentlemen f 201 

altogether have preferred this gentleman's 
blame. 

Nothing is so easy as to be what we 
nowadays call a critic. Unless you are 
mentally unsound, you must have certain 
opinions regarding the books v;hich may 
come under your eye. Entertaining such 
opinions, you are required to express them 
with moderate ease and glibness, though 
the integrity demanded of your syntax 
will, I suppose, vary according to the 
*' tone " of your journal or the liberality of 
your wage. For my own part, when re- 
flecting that I too possess, in common with 
the rest of my race, opinions about the lit- 
erary performances of my contemporaries, 
I cannot but feel that I would sell almost 
anything else in the world rather than be- 
come a daily — or weekly — vender of these 
opinions. Oranges, bananas, gentlemen's 
braces, lead-pencils — you may go through 
a very long list of salable things (if you 
will only leave me my good name), and I 
feel certain that you will hit upon nothing 
which I should not prefer to sell rather 
than these inevitably haphazard and often 
grossly unjust personal opinions. I have 
not the slightest doubt that some future 
day will see newspaper criticism as com- 



202 Should Critics he Gentlemen ? 

pletely abolished as the whipping-post, the 
stocks, imprisonment for debt and other 
exploded nuisances. 

The first delicious sense of power in a 
young writer is always accompanied by a 
conviction that he can teach others how to 
write and how not to write. He may him- 
self have done nothing more noteworthy 
than a few lyrics in the Waverley Magazine^ 
that publication which takes pride, I am 
informed, in asserting that it thrives upon 
the cacoethes of the would-be Tennysons 
and Thackerays, and which boasts of never 
having paid a dollar for any of the extra- 
ordinary verses and stories thronging its 
innumerable pages. He may only have 
written a vapid little tale for some local 
journal, — let us say in Brundusium, Ohio, 
— or a peppery editorial or two in the pages 
of a sheet eagerly subscribed for by the 
citizens of Gomorrah, Wyoming Territory. 
But he will feel himself a critic, just the 
same. Give him his head, and he will 
scamper rough-shod over Dante and Robert 
Louis'Stevenson, Milton and Henry James, 
with the same unsparing ardor of treatment. 
He will adore, he will hate ; he will dissect, 
he will generalize ; he will vituperate, he 
will condone ; he will scorn, he will wor- 



Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 203 

ship. In other words, he possesses pre- 
judices /r<? and co7iy for which he desires un- 
restricted vent. If the editor of the New 
York Tribune were to advertise for a critic 
to-morrow, I have no doubt that the appli- 
cants for such office would swiftly swell 
into thousands throughout a single day. 
The one thing that all literary tyros believe 
themselves capa'nle of doing, and of doing 
superlatively well, is criticism upon writers 
of recognized name. They think it, in the 
words of the old phrase, to be 'as easy as 
lying;" and I regret to add that in other 
respects they often make it not dissimilar 
from that wide-spread weakness. News- 
paper offices naturally swarm with persons 
of just this analytic and ambitious turn. 
The editors will tell you that many more 
neophytes aspire to do ''review work" than 
to embark upon the mundane reportorial 
drudgeries. It is chiefly from these very 
self-sufficient and audacious beings that the 
author receives his worst assaults. The 
world appears to perceive that this is true, 
and yet with regard to the author himself 
it rather curiously misunderstands and mis- 
values the whole situation. " Do not notice 
your critics !" it cries to the indignant vic- 
tim, about whose ears peas from ambus- 



204 Shall Id Critics be Gentlemen ? 

caded shooters may be whizzing, and with 
some annoyance if with no actual peril. 
"They are quite beneath you. It is in the 
worst possible taste for you to show the 
least consciousness on your part that they 
exist at all." But meanwhile the injured 
author, recipient as he so often is of abso- 
lute insult, finds himself called upon to ob- 
serve that the world gives his critics a fair 
share of respectful attention. My own ex- 
periences of this self-contradictory move- 
ment have been rather amusing. I have 
on certain occasions inly smiled as I heard 
comments delivered to me upon my own 
works which echoed with a servility that 
was perhaps unconscious more than a single 
statement extant in yesterday's newspaper. 
Whether, indeed, the general reading pub- 
lic does concern itself with these observa- 
tions is, after all, questionable ; but it is 
true that there are two classes who do 
peruse them and often study them carefully 
as well — an author's friends and his ene- 
mies. This is a constituency which never 
fails the most spiteful reviewer, and it is 
one upon which he counts in the main- 
tenance of his wholly useless position. 

I insist that it is in every case a useless 
position, even when it ir. charitably rather 



Should Critics be Gcntleinoi f 205 

than maliciously maintained. Newspaper 
critics are as little wanted as newspaper 
advertisements are greatly wanted — and 
paid for on that account. Publishers send 
books to the daily or weekly press with but 
one motive — that they shall be copiously 
praised. Some three or four volumes of a 
work are for this reason given away when- 
ever publication occurs. The distribution 
is made for commercial reasons alone, and 
the publishers, through slender sales, are 
often losers because of it. Upon them the 
loss alone falls ; they are so many copies 
"out." They read adverse notices — too fre- 
quently tissues of reckless falsehood when 
not the product of minds either jaded from 
underpaid overwork or by nature meagrely 
equipped for the tasks entered upon — with 
a bitterness quite as acute as the author's. 
Hostility that touches a man's pocket irri- 
tates him quite as much as that which 
touches his self-esteem. Publishers are to- 
day groaning at the churlish paragraphic 
treatment which their gratuitous copies 
receive from newspapers to which they are 
sent. And yet these gentlemen still con- 
tinue to send. They recognize the absurdity, 
the foolhardiness, of the whole system, but, 
like many another abuse, it obtains because 



2o6 Should Critics be Gcntlcinen ? 

it has become time-honored, and they still 
go on practically sanctioning it. A few 
months ago I received from a publisher of 
excellent standing and universally accepted 
shrewdness a declaration that surprised me 
because of its unexpected frankness. It 
was distinctly to the effect that he himself 
would be glad enough to do away with the 
whole custom of offering books for journal- 
istic attention and discussion, provided 
three or four houses of similar repute to 
his own would agree upon a similar course. 
But there lay the fatal impediment. His 
cojifrcres were always hoping that a book 
issued by them would have the luck to 
secure wide approval from the critics, be 
written about in one homogeneous strain 
of praise from Vermont to Utah, and hence 
secure a '" boom" that would swell financial 
receipts afterward. But such a golden 
trouvaille of good fortune is very rarely hit 
upon. It is nearly always the same order 
of things with the despots of the many 
petty provinces. They may be clad with a 
little brief authority, but they propose to 
get all the wear procurable out of this 
flimsy and transient vestment. They are 
determined to strut about in it, to drape its 
foldS;, as might be said, with a becoming 



Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 207 

pe.-sonal dignity. Tompkins would not 
write of the last novel or poem or biogra- 
p'ly as Smith has done for even an extra 
dollar a week added to his pathetic salary ; 
and there are nine chances out of ten that 
B.-own will feel himself equally thrilled by 
liis own individualism and mental import- 
ance when examining the decisions of 
Tompkins or Smith. No ; the commercial 
value of the whole arbitrary and whimsical 
process is almost always 7iil to the aggrieved 
publisher. He finds that as a rule his 
" selling" books are those which the critics 
treat even more shabbily than usual, or 
concerning which they disagree with an 
unwonted ardor. He feels in his heart that 
the newspaper is to be trusted simply as a 
medium of information between himself 
and his public, declaring that certain works 
have been issued by him, and can be bought 
just as he has bought the means of so 
asserting. He has a full perception of the 
flippancy, the acrimony and the incom- 
petence by which his donations are inces- 
santly rewarded. And he still makes them, 
notwithstanding. Some day there will be 
a quiet and effectual revolt against this 
flagrant injustice. Some day the v/rong 
will right itself, and instead of receiving 



2o8 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

bundles of new books by the morning mail 
or express, that sapient institution, our 
modern newspaper, will find the avowal of 
its literary loves and hates alike unsolicited. 
Such a prophecy may sound millennial ; so 
does that of an international copyright 
law, whose absence makes us properly the 
jeer of almost every other civilized nation, 
and turns all our authors into men without 
countries. But one day we shall have in- 
ternational copyright, nevertheless, just as 
one day we shall carelessly and almost un- 
consciously dispense with all such minor 
tyrannies as newspaper critics. 

As an example of extreme sincerity and 
honesty among members of this guild, I 
should like to chronicle a particular in- 
cident which befell myself. One evening, 
about eight years ago, just before the ap- 
pearance of my first book of poems, "Fan- 
tasy and Passion," I went to a reception 
given at the Lotos Club, in New York. 
Among the assembled guests was a certain 
person whom some optimists have seriously 
stated to be a poet. He had a position, 
then, upon some evening paper as its liter- 
ary critic ; I am not quite sure whether or 
no it was the journal which he at present 
represents, though I think not. He had 



Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 209 

been writing with belligerence and not a 
little clear malignity about certain poems 
of mine in the Atlantic Monthly and else- 
where, and when I received from a mutual 
acquaintance his request to cross the rooms 
and speak with him, I felt considerable 
surprise. After very little hesitation, how- 
ever, I refused point-blank ; and yet I sent 
no uncivil message, since the whole affair 
was one of quite too much indifference to 
me for that. As I subsequently learned, 
however, he became excessively angry on 
hearing' of my unwillingness, and indeed 
lost all control of his temper. " I will kill 
that man !" he exclaimed to my peaceful 
and astonished emissary, finishing his sen- 
tence with a robust oath, and beginning 

his next sentence with another. " By , 

Ive killed bigger men than he is, and I'll 
kill him r This murderous threat bore no 
allusion to my own life, but rather to that 
of my first book of poems, " Fantasy and 
Passion." On the appearance of that book, 
the gentleman certainly behaved like a 
critic VN^ith a private graveyard for the 
corpses of those reputations which he had 
already wrathfully slain. Whether he suc- 
ceeded in burying my own there or not I 
leave his most amiable conscience to decide. 



210 Should Critics be Gentlemen? 

I seem to have somehow risen from my 
ashes, if this is true ; but it may be only 
one of those delusions born of an author's 
inextinguishable egotism, even after he him- 
self has been given a permanent quietus. 

But I deny that the least egotism has 
impelled me to record this dramatic little 
episode. I have merely wished to show 
what exquisite fidelity to principles, what 
honorable discharge of responsibility, may 
exist among these critics of newspapers, 
from whom we are entitled surely to ex- 
pect an unbiassed and disinterested ex- 
pression of their likes and dislikes, if noth- 
ing more final and valuable. There is no 
part of my narration at all doubtful as to 
fact. The gentleman who was a v/itness of 
this critic's fine rageful outburst and an 
auditor of his anathema, made no mistake 
in what he saw and heard. Now, let us 
consider, from an article signed with his 
own name in a recent issue of his journal, 
just what philosophic and flawless theories 
of criticism this reviewer, who vowed he 
would kill me and who has killed bigger men 
than I am, fosters enough diverting effront- 
ery to print. "They," writes our Thalaba, 
alluding to certain other reviewers whom 
his ov/n rancorous postulates have offended, 



Should Critics be Gcntlancn ? 2 1 1 

*' might keep their temper, as I do mine, 
and they need ?iot attribute personal motives to 
7ne, for I have none. No man ivho is worthy 
of the name of a critic ever zvrites from a per- 
sonal motive. His business is not to deal 
with the author, the artist, the actor, but 
with his work." Yes. my lusty arch-foe, 
you are for once wholly right. And you 
might have added, '' His business is also 
not to growl profane and ridiculous menaces 
against an author whose book he has not 
yet even seen, and then to indulge in slan- 
derous comments regarding that author, 
whenever occasion serves, during a period 
of eight succeeding years." I can scarcely 
explain why memory wanders just here to 
that tragic incident in " Pendennis" where 
the " Spring Annual " containing poor Pen's 
verses (and very lovely verses they were, 
as we all recall in thinking of '' The Church 
Porch") fell into the hands of Mr. Bludyer. 
''Mr. Bludyer," runs the passage, "who 
was a man of very considerable talent, . . . 
had a certain notoriety in his profession, 
and reputation for savage humor. He 
smashed and trampled dov;n the poor 
spring-flowers with no more mercy than a 
bull would have on a parterre ; and, hav- 
ing cut up the vi^lume to his heart's con- 



2 1 2 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

lent, went and sold it at a book-stall, and 
purchased a pint of brandy with the pro- 
ceeds of the volume." 

I am well aware that it is nowadays the 
fashion for authors not to "answer" their 
critics. If Byron should write his " Eng- 
lish Bards and Scotch Reviewers" at the 
present time, its pungent satire would be 
denounced as in execrable taste, and all 
his friends would pull long faces when 
they met him, in sorrow at his exceeding 
temerity. The newspapers are now sup- 
posed to be omnipotent in crushing a man, 
and to " fight" them, as the phrase goes, is 
looked upon as courting sure destruction. 
But while the law mercifully draws a line 
at positive libel, I cannot see just why the 
publicity which they are capable of causing 
should deter an honest man or an honest 
woman from resenting outrage. If you 
are reviled because you have dared to write 
a book, I fail to understand why you 
should shrink from a little more abuse for 
denying false charges against it. You say 
to me, my friend, that I should hold all 
critics in contempt. So I will, when the 
publishers refrain from holding them in 
respect. So I will, when I cease to find 
their praise used in advertisements of my 



SJioiild Critics be Gentlemen ? 213 

works, like the certificate of a schoolboy's 
good conduct. So I will, when I know 
them receiving disregard, and not propitia- 
tion. So I will, when society says to me, 
*'It is a very serious and great art, this art 
of criticism, and it is neither the ruffianly 
swinging of a bludgeon nor the insecure 
handling of a scalpel." 

It seems to me that if a true critic should 
arise in the world he would be as worthy 
of homage and reverence as the noblest 
philosopher or poet who ever lived. He 
would be as dispassionate as the law of 
gravitation and as charitable as the all- 
dispensing sun. But, alas ! when and 
where have we had a true critic ? Emer- 
son ? He is as divine in his misjudgments 
as he is trustworthy in his splendid intui- 
tions. Carlyle? He wasa/(?i-<?^/;', a shrieker, 
who scolded ostentatiously and made peo- 
ple remark his tempest because it was en- 
closed in so fantastic a teapot. Besides, 
these men were not literary critics in any 
true sense. But Taine, the remarkable and 
brilliant Taine, is a literary critic ; and yet 
who can forgive him for being so much of a 
Frenchman as to put De Musset above Ten- 
nyson ? There is no criticism at all except 
that which founds itself upon inflexible, 



214 Should Criiits be Geiitlevicn? 

logical science. If beauty, eloquence, poet- 
ry, rhythm, harmony, style, taste, insight 
inio human character, sympathy with the 
phases and subtleties of nature, are not 
susceptible of scientific definition and clas- 
sification, they are not truth — for all truth 
is so susceptible, sooner or later. It will 
not do for A to tell me that Poe's ''An- 
nabel Lee" has an "indefinable melody," 
an "unfathomable tenderness." B, who 
does not sec with the eyes of A at all, may 
think "Annabel Lee" a mere sensuous and 
senseless jingle. Both sides may rave, for 
and against, over the merits or the short- 
comings of these stanzas. But enthusi- 
asm settles no more than vituperation does. 
De gustibus noii disputandum is a sword of 
epigram that simply tries to cut the throat 
of criticism. I do not mean that he who 
tells me why a poem is beautiful should 
explain to me what beauty is. He can no 
more do that than he can tell me what 
matter is when he states that one mass of 
it, the earth, moves round another mass of 
it, the sun. But he can find some living 
law — as I almost believe the German 
thinker, Schopenhauer, has done—which 
governs beauty in all its forms of develop- 
ment and manifestation. All modern crit- 



SJioiild Critics be Gentlemen ? 215 

icism is summed up in this: "I, John 
Smith, declare that John Brown has or has 
not genius, has or has not ability, is or is 
not a poet, a philosopher, a historian, a 
novelist." We are overrun with essays and 
disquisitions on writers ; we are surfeited 
with ipse dixi ; we have had enougli and 
more than enough of a priori dogmatism. 
I know that there are a great many people 
who are prepared to shudder at the thought 
of science being applied to any of their 
aesthetic pleasures. Whenever it is a ques- 
tion of their bodily health, of the bread they 
eat, of the air they breathe, of the clothes 
they wear, of the colds they catch, of the 
deaths they are likely to die, they accept the 
only aid and guidance which their reason 
assures them to be the potent one. But 
with literature they must indulge a sen- 
timental acceptance of the inscrutable. It 
appears to me that newspaper critics and 
all the numberless foibles which their ran- 
dom dicta beget are a result of just this 
drowsy bigotry. " How," cries the quiver- 
ing voice of sentimentality, "can you de- 
monstrate to me the fragrance of the rose 
or the whiteness of the lily ?" My answer 
must be, " I can do neither ultimately, but 
I can do both relatively. If I were a news- 



2 1 6 Should Critics be Genthincn ? 

paper critic, I might assert that the rose was 
odorless and the lily blood-red. These 
would be statements quite as unsupported 
by proof as many which stare at us from the 
pages of our morning journals, in their ' lit- 
erary' columns. But I can prove inductively 
and comparatively, if you will, that to you 
the odor diffused by your rose has a right to 
be called agreeable, and similarly that the 
purity of your lily has a right to be called 
chaste." I am prone to believe that very 
marvellous things may be done in litera- 
ture when this abhorred science has begun 
to investigate it. There must be very pow- 
erful radical reasons why we are all so 
willing to think " Hamlet" a work of genius. 
Thus far nearly all the writers who have 
told us why have considered rather too 
much who is telling it and how it is being 
told. The paths of the essayist and the 
analyst are widely divergent. One is full 
of the pretty buds of rhetoric — the Jlosadi 
setitentiarimi — which it is hard not occasion- 
ally to stop and pluck. The other is bloom- 
less, and even granitic, with no temptations 
for the rhapsodist over floriculture, and a 
very stern method in the recurrence of its 
mile-stones. 

There is a publishing-house in New York 



SJuntld Critics be Gentlemen ? 217 

— that of Messrs. Funk &Wagnalls, if I may 
be permitted to mention its name without 
bringing on myself the awful accusation of 
wishing to "puff" it — which has struck me 
as having hit, in the turmoil and fatuity of 
newspaper criticism, upon a mode of win- 
ning public attention at once legitimate 
and salutary. This house has conceived 
the plan of sending to authors of estab- 
lished fame copies of the new books which 
it has issued, and asking from them a few 
lines, to be printed as advertisement if 
thought advisable. Surely this attitude, if 
persistently perserved, is one which in time 
could be made stoutly to prevail over all 
the haphazard treatises of the ordinary re- 
viewers. If the author under considera- 
tion, whoever he may be, could look into 
the columns of a newspaper and find that 
Tennyson, Mr. Herbert Spencer, Mr. Lecky, 
Mr. Tyndall or Mr. Froude had not only 
praised his work, but allowed such praise 
to be openly published as a help to him 
against the puerilities and jealousies of the 
mere empirical bunglers, how thankful he 
might have good reason to feel ! And 
even if lesser writers could be brought to 
lend each other their warm, sweet aid, 
whenever they could truthfully and sin- 



2 1 8 SJionld Critics he Gentleuien ? 

cerely do so, what a gentle but telling fight 
would be waged against those wrangling 
" professionals" who now swarm about a 
book like minnows round a freshl3^-dropped 
bait ! True enough, there would be no 
real criticism in all this. It would be a 
compromise, not a settlement ; an improve- 
ment, not a remedy. Authors are not crit- 
ics, because all individual talent (or genius, 
which is precisely the same as talent in 
kind, though not in degree) presupposes 
limitation. But authors are in most cases 
vastly better critics than the so-termed 
critics themselves. I know with what de- 
rision the latter might feel inclined to hail 
my statement. It would be as extraor- 
dinary, if they did not so hail it, as the 
popularization of agnosticism among the 
clergy. And yet if you, reader, had written 
a poem, whom would you choose to have 
for its eulogist ? The Dryasdust who glares 
at it with a preconceived hatred because 
the Muses are nine and so are the children 
whom he has to support by hack-work on 
the Saturday Scorpion ? Or would 3^our pref- 
erence be just one brief sentence from the 
wise and tender lips of such a man as the 
late Mr. Longfellow? Whose approval 
would please you more ? Would not the 



Should Critics he Gentlemen ? 219 

first, indeed, turn to utter tameness beside 
the last ? Surely yes, I think, although 
few poets have ever been more infamously 
assailed in their time than Longfellow was. 
I remember that once while I was a guest 
in his lovely home our conversation drifted 
upon critics. His mild, lucid eye almost 
flashed as he said to me, "Whenever I have 
been attacked by one of those fellows I 
always feel as if I had been blackguarded 
in the street !" This may prove interest- 
ing to a few of '^ those fellows'' who still 
live ; but, whether it does or not, I repeat 
Longfellow's exact words. A little later, 
during that same visit, he said to me, 
" Never notice your critics, under any cir- 
cumstances." And I have always remem- 
bered the little gesture of disdain that went 
with these words ; for Longfellow was by 
no means the milk-and-water personage 
whom some of his biographers have painted 
him, but a man of the world, trained in the 
choicest niceties and elegances, and with a 
savoir-faire and dignity of demeanor that 
I have seldom seen equalled. Even if he 
had not been the true and noble poet he 
was, he could never have become a critic ; 
his manners were far too good for that. 
In allusion to Poe's pitiable dirt-throwing, 



220 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

he spoke with the gentlest reserve ; and yet 
he told me, shaking his head for a moment 
with evident melancholy, that Poe was in 
his debt for a considerable sum of money 
at the period this scurrilous onslaught had 
been made. Well, time has been the 
avenger, and Poe's meanness has borne no 
fruit. The fame of Longfellow will stay 
luminous for generations to be, w^hile that 
of Poe, in the poetical sense, is kept fever- 
ishly alive by fanatical admirers whom the 
meretricious tawdriness of his verse (apart 
from the really astonishing quality of his 
prose) fails to convince that he was by no 
means a poet. I have always been able to 
understand just why Poe was so ferocious, 
narrow and ungentlemanly a "critic" of 
other men's writing since I heard the words 
of a man who had once seen and talked 
with him. The man was a printer, the 
head of a reputable printing establishment, 
and what he communicated to me regard- 
ing his single experience of Poe I then had 
every reason to believe, and still believe 
implicitly. "I once saw Edgar Poe." de- 
clared my informant, "and shall never 
forget the meeting. He called upon me 
and made to me a proposition regarding a 
newspaper which he wished to establish. 



SJwuld Critics be Gentlemen? 221 

His proposition was thoroughly immoral, 
involving a distinct scheme of fraud, and 
his condition when he made it was one of 
the most revolting drunkenness." If Poe 
had ever succeeded in starting that news- 
paper, we can easily imagine, from the in- 
solent personalities which some of his mis- 
cellanies now^ contain, how detestable would 
have been its " critical " posture. What he 
wrote in it regarding his contemporaries 
would probably have been as foolish as his 
poetry, and a great deal more poisonous. 
As a weaver of wondrous romances his ex- 
ceptional intellect deserves all honor ; but 
when he attitudinizes as a newspaper critic 
he almost teaches us to forget " The Fall of 
the House of Usher" and '* The Cask of 
Amontillado," while we remember vividly 
enough the strut and nonsense of ^"Ulalume" 
and the verbose, theatrical prolixity of 
"The Raven." Scientific criticism can make 
plain enough just why such poems as these 
are worthless, and a like test will serve, I 
am very certain, to demolish as equally 
trivial the volleys poured upon Longfellow 
and others. 

If all the misery, the despondency, the 
feeling of brutal wrong and the despairing 



222 Should Critics be Gcntlci:icn? 

apathy which has resulted from newspaper 
criticism could be massed together in one 
dolorous chapter, such accumulation would 
form a tragedy horrible past thought. No 
writer has ever been young and striven 
who has not passed through stages of 
needless pain at comments which are some- 
times bruited abroad concerning his work 
by people who might not wish, in the or- 
dinary following of their lives, to injure £i 
fly. Gifford may not have really killed 
Keats, after all : I hope there never has 
been a Gifford in the world strong enough 
to kill, or a Keats weak enough to let him 
self be killed. But if the free lances of the 
press really could see the red and vital 
blood which their calumnious thrusts will 
sometimes draw from young and sensitive 
breasts, I am confident that they would 
blush with shame as red as the blood itself. 
I have thouglit a great deal on the subject, 
and I am wholly unable to understand why 
a young man who publishes a trashy novel, 
or a trashy poem, or a trashy anything else, 
should have it fulminated against in the 
newspapers. It may be as bad as human 
intelligence can conceive of, and it may 
write its author down an ass fifty times 



Should Critics be Gcntleuicn? 223 

over. But it is nearly always a work of 
perfectly unconscious absurdity. I have 
always suspected that the " Sweet Singer 
of Michigan" was a clever man or woman 
who played a deliberate part in those ap- 
parently well-intentioned stanzas of his or 
hers. But there are many singers who be- 
lieve themselves to be sweet and are not, 
and who have got into print, and yet ^vho 
possess nerve-centres, capacities for trem- 
bling under fierce rebuff, organizations fit 
to thrill v-/ith quite as much emotion as 
their verses are powerless to express. Why 
rail against these harmless victims of an 
illusive w^ill-o'-the-wisp? Why call ihem 
names, and stamp upon them, and question 
Jove himself as to the object of their crea- 
tion ? No service to literature is done by 
giving them sleepless nights and days of 
torment. Their feeble books are perfectly 
sure of dying, without denunciation being 
hurled at them the m.oment they are born. 
Nobody will read them, in any case. Pray 
do not flatter yourself, fiery-eyed critic, 
with your furious foot still upon one of 
their gilt-edged offspring, that 3^ou have 
performed the slightest public benefit by 
your frenzy of condemnation. You have 



224 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

simply succeeded in making a fellow-crea- 
ture's heart suffer — nothing more. Your 
rodomontade was not at all wanted ; so- 
ciety could have done quite as well without 
it. The world at large has the same re- 
luctance to buy the book of a new author 
that you or I may have to strike an 
acquaintance with some plausible person 
who accosts us on a steamboat or a railway- 
car. And with the author of fixed position 
it is very much the same. He has won his 
spurs, and you critics can neither burnish 
them brighter nor cast upon them the least 
film of tarnish. There is more potency in 
a word or tw^o, favorable or unfavorable, 

about my last book, delivered by X to 

Z over their friendly dinner, than in all 

the glory of your panegyric or all the dark- 
ness of your diatribe. Leave the authors 
alone, and their destinies are just as certain 
as though you did not seek to manipulate 
them. A good book was never yet made 
unpopular because you contemned it, nor 
a poor one salable because you shouted in 
its behalf. The community can find out 
what they w^ant to read without your mul- 
tiplex and bewildering counsel. There is 
one thing that you can do, and I am im- 



Should Critics be Gentlemen? 225 

pressed with an idea that you do it most 
pertinaciously and relentlessly : you can 
inflict torture upon the callow authors and 
sharp annoyance upon the veteran ones. 
Don't believe any author, though his hair 
be as white as eighty years can turn it, 
when he tells you that he doesn't care for 
your stabs and pin-pricks. Of course he 
cares. I will warrant you he is a pretty 
tepid and spineless kind of an author if he 
does not. Would not you care, messieurs, 
if you were trying to ford a muddy street, 
and a troop of vicious roysterers passed 
you in another direction, splashing the mud 
farther than your boots — as far even as 
your eyes ? Mud is mud, you know, gen- 
tlemen, no matter who throws it at one. 
It dries easily, and Jane the housemaid or 
John the valet can quite nicely dust it 
from one's trousars or w^aistcoat the next 
morning. But you have a disagreeable 
after-thought, nevertheless, of how easy it 
would have been for those riotous persons 
who met you yesterday not to have cast 
it. 

I should like for once to see and shake 
hands with a newspaper critic who had no 
conscientious belief that he was one of the 



226 Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 

guardians at the gates of his nationa) 
literature. It would be delightful to find 
so welcome a product of modern intelli- 
gence. I should naturally object to him 
for being a newspaper critic at all, but I 
should control that objection without diffi- 
culty because of gratitude at his charming 
rarity. If it were in my power to secure 
him a clerkship in a bank, a position in the 
custom-house, how gladly I would offer to 
do so ! And I am certain he would accept 
with alacrity, for he would be so anxious 
to leave the company of his fellow-critics, 
who all had convinced themselves that they 
held, each one, an especial grip upon the 
wheel that moves public appreciation this 
way or that. Ah, let such autocrats as 
these go to their elders, who have passed 
years in supposably moulding the fates of 
authors. Let them ask such warriors in a 
trifling war if they honestly think they 
have ever either slain or saved an author. 
I fancy that I know what the answer will 
be, if it is truly an honest one. And then 
comes the irreversible question : Why harass 
and retard and irritate energies which, 
after all, provided they be energies of the 
slightest real momentum, must finally 



Should Critics be Gentlemen ? 227 

brush away such embarrassments as if they 
were gnats ? Learn your trade, gentlemen 
(or your art, if it be an art), before you at- 
tempt to practise it. Science points you 
the path, not whim or conceit or vainglory. 
It is a straight path, but a clear one. And 
its first foothold, if I mistake not, is hu- 
mane courtesy. 



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